


No Kingdom for a Blacksmith

by macneiceisms



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, F/M, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2017-11-12 16:34:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macneiceisms/pseuds/macneiceisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exiled from the Brotherhood without Banners after seven years of service, Gendry arrives wounded at a Winterfell plagued by wolves and struggling to rebuild in the middle of the long winter. But he is not the only one coming home — across the narrow sea, Arya Stark begins the last leg of her own odyssey, picking up her journey home where she left it. </p><p>(Post ADWD Future Fic, mostly canon-compliant, Arya-centric, AryaxGendry)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bran

**Author's Note:**

> My endless thanks to Dee, whose love for Gendry and Arya helped me through the rough patches. To Lani, who was there with ideas and always willing to read over what I had written. To Anthony, who has been my tireless partner in crime for three years. To Annalesa because this is 60% her fault. And to everyone who ever posted a comment, asked a question, or wrote anything from scrambled theories on their blogs to detailed literary criticism, I thank you for the inspiration and critical state of mind you gave me to write this story as sensitively and imaginatively as I could.  
> Idril made a lovely [trailer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYpq8sPcrlU&feature=g-u-u) to accompany this story, so please, check it out.

The sea turned to blood and a castle upon the shore crumbled in the storm. The wolves of the Wolfswood cried out and gorged on horseflesh, black soot on their claws as they scratched and bit through the skins and leathers of the man with the sword. He stared into the yellow eyes of the wolves, small and ragged and starving and fell upon his knees.

Bran opened his eyes.

The bells at the gates were ringing.

 

A man arrived on foot, in a brown fur and sheepskin cloak, grown ragged against the blistering cold of a winter night. Bran shivered as the wind bit hard at his cheeks. Hodor wheeled Bran's chair, a sturdy but heavy contraption of oak and iron faster into the yard to get a closer look at the man who stood in the frozen mud.

"Please, m'lord, I'm a smith. I can work," he rasped at the point of half a dozen swords, breath misting white in the light of the torches.

"Lord Stark, we have few rooms as it is and even less food," said Alysane Mormont. Bran tugged his cloak closer about his shoulders. The ragged man's face was dirty and along his brow was a smattering of crusted blood. He had no horse and no food. Beneath his matted hair, in dark and hungry sockets, his storm blue eyes burned.

He was not the first to come through the gates like this, and would not be the last. The urchins and the ragged mothers with their children begged with red rimmed eyes, watery with hunger. Ned Stark would not have let his own people be left to waste away. A man could not be the warden of graves and bones.

"Put your swords down," commanded Bran, wary but resolute. A gust of wind blew true and cold through the yard. Bran's eyes watered and the torches roared and sputtered. "We can find him a room somewhere. If it has to be the stables, then it must be so."

One by one, the swords lowered. Bran could see the whites of the smith's eyes, wary, terrified. Alysane came to him with an open hand. The smith stumbled backwards and nearly fell, but she hoisted the strange man's arm about her shoulders with ease.

"Come on boy, we can find you a warm bed of hay, at least."

"What is this?" a clear voice called. Bran turned his head and saw Sansa step through the archway. Her hair was in a single plait, a gleaming rope of copper against her thick ermine cloak. 

"It seems a traveler, my lady," said Alysane, bowing her head. 

Sansa was followed by the Maid of Tarth, hastily clad in boiled leather, who inspected the traveler without taking her hand off the hilt of her sword. Her eyes met Sansa's, and Sansa nodded. Bran was not privy to what had come to pass.

"It's the middle of the night, Bran. You should be resting," said Sansa, coming close enough to flood the man's battered face in light from the torch in her hand. The wounds were worse in sharp relief. He was bruised, bloody, and gaunt. Like Bran's dream.

"He came," said Bran to Sansa, who looked to him sharply. "I dreamt it." 

"You have only come home and should be resting." Her mouth was a grim line.

"My lord, perhaps it would be best if you went inside, the chill is bitter," said Lady Alysane. 

"Then we will all come inside," said Bran firmly. Sansa had never felt real cold. She'd never been North of the Wall. 

"I'll have someone find a room, my lord," said Brienne, "You can manage with him, Alysane?"

"He's heavy for a starving lad, perhaps you should take him."

Brienne did, easily trading the smith's arm from Alysane's shoulder to own, which was taller and broader.

"Do you have a name for us to call you by?" Sansa asked politely. The man, gripping Brienne's cloak, gave a weak cough and lifted his head to look at her.

"Gendry, m'lady," he said, confused.

"We ought to get out of the cold, Gendry," said Sansa. "All of us." She let Alysane lead the way, and Brienne followed with Gendry leaning heavily on his shoulders.

"Come on, Hodor," said Bran to the stable boy, "Follow Sansa."

"Hodor," said Hodor.

Alysane Mormont was with Maester Samwell when Bran reached the servant's quarters deep within the main keep, far behind the others, who were uncrippled and had no need of a chair. 

"It's no bigger than a cupboard, but it's the only lone room we have left. I'll be leaving you; my youngest is running a fever."

"Maester Samwell will see your boy when is done here," Sansa smiled gently, and Lady Alysane bowed.

"Lady Alysane, Calon had the gates locked already," said the serving boy.

"You tell Jacks and Quent they need the good gloves for the watch tonight on top of the wool ones. Wool ones inside, no matter how hard those boys think it is to hold a sword. Shadd lost three fingers last week."

Alysane Mormont left them at the door of the empty room. The quarters were small and sparse, with a single cot pushed against the wall, at its foot a pine bench, and a rickety chair by the door, but warmer by far than the stables. No more than ten paces in either direction, the room was kept warm by the faint halo of heat from the walls and the brazier in the corner of the room.

Bran reached out for a moment and touched the wall, glad the stone still pulsed with warmth and gladder still the walls of Winterfell still stood. There had been a time when the halls were filled with the echoes of laughter, but upon Bran's return they were nothing but a ruin with snow falling through the eaves and dusting the burnt remains of beds and tables, beautiful bookcases and desks as if they were nothing more than the charred bones of another life, another Winterfell. The rebuilt stone where the walls had caved in were warm, but ghosts lived there.

"Come on, Gendry, we need to get you out of those wet clothes before chill gets into your bones," said Sam, helping Brienne hold him steady upon the bench.

"S'not so bad, m'lord," he mumbled in return, and winced as his cloak was unbuckled and fell heavily to the side. Small, with skinny arms, the boy was nonetheless strong. He dragged Gendry's muddy cloak from the thin rushes without even turning his nose up at the blood. Even Sam, hardened by the Wall and trained by the Citadel, would have hesitated.

"Fetch broth and warm wine, and my supplies for treating wounds," ordered Sam, and the boy skittered away. Gendry flinched often as Sam and Brienne toiled to remove his soiled and tattered outer clothing, but he furrowed his brow and sat through the pain, glassy-eyed and tired.

"I've no need of a featherbed, m'lord," he mumbled, leaning heavily on the fat maester as he was settled on the bed, sitting against a few pillows. He looked larger than he had leaning on the steward, or limping towards the gate.

Sansa stood behind Bran, her hand resting on Bran's shoulder. Sam fed the man and made sure he took only measured bites and sips. He was more compliant as his lips began to lose their bluish tinge, but he fussed as Sam tried to sink his weary feet into a pail of warm water.

"Do you want to keep your toes, or not?" the maester said.

The smith glared as Sam shoved the soup spoon in his mouth, equal irritation in his dark blue eyes. Silent as ever, he relented and let himself be taken care of, but a few moments later he was overtaken by a fit of wet, rasping coughs and fell back onto the pillows from the effort. His eyes fluttered closed and he turned his head away from the next spoon that was offered him. Sighing, Sam put aside the half empty bowl of broth and called a servant.

"I'll have to clean and wrap those cuts now you're finished eating," he said reluctantly to Gendry, who only nodded in return. It was not Sam who was wounded, but the pinched look on his face belied the fact.

"Come on, Bran. We will leave Maester Samwell to his work," she said.

Her grip was a vice on Bran's shoulder and he reached up to place his own atop hers. At the touch of his hand, she let go and folded her arms neatly upon her fur shawl.

"I will stay," Bran said solemnly from his chair beside the bed, "It would be poor hospitality to leave him."

"Bran."

"Sansa, I would stay with him." His dream would not leave him; when he closed his eyes he saw wolves and the sea.

"If it's your wish, brother," she said after a pause, tight lipped.

"It is," Bran lowered his voice, "I want to know he lives."

Sansa stared at Bran before glancing at the guest, examining his large and bony frame propped up by several pillows and the sharp hollows under his cheekbones and ribs. Sansa sighed and gave a curtsy to the maester.

"Maester Samwell, thank you for your help."

"Thank you, my lady."

"Goodnight. Bran," she said, turning to him anew, "I trust you know what you are doing."

"I do, Sansa."

She nearly left, but stopped at the door.

"I pray for your health, Ser Gendry."

She gave him a queer look and left the room, her fur lined skirt swishing behind her softly. Ser Gendry? When had Gendry said he was a knight? They had once shared a love of stories and had talked for hours, eating lemon cakes and humming Florian and Jonquil, but now he could not say with certainty that he knew her. It had been years and years since they had shared a fur blanket by the hearth, Sansa young enough to not care about drawing her knees up in the chair with him and listen to the tales Old Nan told of gallant knights and noble deeds done long ago.

He would pause sometimes on his way past her solar and listen to her play the high harp; a towering creature, carved of mahogany wood from the forests of the Reach and gleaming ivory from across the Narrow Sea.  A flower with a serpent beneath it,  Sansa had called it — a gift from the Dragon Queen to warm Sansa's heart to relinquishing her late husband's claim to the Vale. The rare chords of Jenny of Oldstones lingered in the halls and her high, clear voice held him fast outside her door. She never sang any happy songs.

Gendry hissed. Maester Samwell had unlaced the top of Gendry's tunic as much as he could before the cloth stuck in the wounds of his shoulder. On the rushes, a small pile of worn and stinking skins lay. The Maester sighed and rubbed his head.

"We have to cut your clothing off. Some won't give easily, and flesh may needs be removed. After there will be wounds that need stitching," the maester said to Gendry, who was shivering slightly. Sam looked green himself.

"Yes, m'lord," was all Gendry said as he squared his jaw, but the Maester gave him a couple of sips of warm strongwine.  It is Sam who should have the wine.

Maester Samwell ran the small knife of his own design through the flame of the candle to prevent festering, as he had told Bran the first time he had observed this sort of work. Tearing rough-spun cloth as gently as he could from half healed wounds, the maester cut away the tunic crusted to Gendry's skin with blood. Sam's face was pale and his hands trembled when he wasn't cutting, but the job was carefully done. Gendry grimaced and cried out through clenched teeth. His skin was pale, cold, and covered in sweat where it wasn't torn by claws or teeth, crusted with dark blood. 

"Wolves?" Bran asked Gendry, who hissed at the sting of the knife.

"My horse looked worse," was all he said.

The servant came back with a bucket of hot water, lightly stinking of sulphur, from the spring in the Godswood, freshly boiled water, strongwine, clean bandages, and a poultice made from a mixture of several herbs and honey. Maester Samwell wiped the wounds with a square of cloth which had been boiled in water and dipped in strongwine. 

"Will they heal?" Bran asked.

"If they don't fester, or if his fever doesn't take him. It's probably the only reason the cold didn't kill him."

He has to live. He is strong, he has to live.

As the grime from his body was washed away, older scars surfaced. Running from under the hinge of his jaw to the hollow of his throat was a particularly nasty one, shallow and jagged, as if someone had held a knife to his neck and Gendry had only narrowly escaped. His ribs, when the maester reached them, were revealed to be a mess of green and purple, the skin hard and hot to the touch. Nearly passed out from weariness, only the wasted muscles along Gendry's chest twitched when Sam poked at the mottled flesh. The smith fell into a pained sleep once the washing was finished entirely.

"Those are probably bruised ribs. He couldn't have walked any ways with broken or cracked ones," said Maester Samwell frowning as he pressed the back of his hand to the bruising and to Gendry's forehead. Sam made a disapproving noise, and pressed the bruised skin again. "He may be bleeding inside."

"How could you tell if he were bleeding inside?"

"There would be blood in the vomit or urine. He has to be watched carefully in the next couple of days. That he survived this long is a miracle."

Bran turned to Gendry once again. He considered for a moment, what to do with him, watching Maester Samwell continue to attend to his wounds, before making a decision.

"Summer and I will watch over him for a few hours. You have Lady Alysane's boy to see."

"My lord, are you certain?"

"Hodor will come find you if something is wrong while you are gone, won't you Hodor?"

"Hodor," agreed Hodor.

Sam fretted for a moment, clawing a bit at his neck where the chain rested heavily against his skin. 

"Check his breathing, and his fever. If it rises, call for me immediately and place cool cloths on his neck and forehead."

"Thank you, Maester Samwell."

The Maester left the room and Bran was alone with Gendry and Hodor, who let Summer in a few minutes later. Gendry slept deeply, his eyelids flickering with dreams as the candle burned down another notch in the wax.

The night wore on, and Bran found his lids growing heavy and soon they closed despite his protests, followed by deeper sleep and dreams. He dreamt of blood under a dim gray sky and the stench of still water in the summer time, he dreamt of whispers in the dark; a wolf howled in sorrow and fear as she ran across the hard snow but wasn't heard.  My sister, he called in his dream but no one answered. He dreamt of the clang of steel and storms upon weathered rock and fury. A small black haired boy cried silently with his fist wrapped in the golden tendrils of his mother's hair as she lay dead upon a bed of straw. Bran dreamt of sorrow and it pulled him under the crashing waves, tossing him against the rocks as he screamed and a hand dragged him under the surface. He looked down and found green eyes staring back at him.

I died for you, Bran, and you can't even open your eyes. Open your eyes!

Bran woke up with a start, his heart pounding and on his brow a cold sweat. He felt Summer nudging his hand with his large wet nose, whining softly.

"What is it, Summer?"

The large wolf turned his head towards the bed and Bran sat up, dread and surprise sinking into his stomach. The smith was shivering, white as his bandages, and trying to get up onto his elbow. His naked chest shone with glossy sweat over the bones of his ribcage, and heaved quietly.

"Hodor," called Bran, "Hodor, wake up and get the bucket please."

The stableboy woke in time. Gendry finally summoned the strength for a proper heave as Hodor stuck the bucket next to him. Out spilled out the broth and strongwine he had taken only an hour ago, but the strongwine Maester Samwell had given him had been brown. Bran paled, silent.

"Hodor," said Hodor.

"It's blood. Give me the pan and fetch Maester Samwell," Bran said as Gendry coughed weakly and spat up more blood. He placed the bucket in his lap and reached over to the sideboard where the wet cloths lay and wiped the man's neck and head as he shuddered. This man had to live. Bran didn't know why, but the smith couldn't be allowed to slip away in the night.

"It's only a fever, it'll pass," Bran murmured in what he hoped were soothing tones. "You did not come all this way to die." Sansa would be better at this than him.

Sam came as quickly as he could, and took over for Bran. Gendry continued to shiver with his eyes shut together and teeth clenched. All Sam could do was mop his brow with care and give him a few drops of milk of the poppy and warm honeyed water. Gendry stopped shaking a little later, but his skin was still burning hot and his abdomen spasmed and clenched with coughs and heaves every few minutes. Summer sat by Gendry's bedside and whined. Gendry noticed the wolf through the daze of his fever.

"No, no," he mumbled, "Not you. I'm sorry. Don't. I never. Please, no."

Bran chastised himself soundly for forgetting to keep out Summer when the man had been attacked by wolves.

"Go, Summer. Get out," said Bran, but his wolf refused to leave. He slipped into Summer's skin and willed him to go, but he was overwhelmed by heavy scents on the air. He smelled sick and blood and funny herb smells, but underneath was a scent so familiar he nearly reeled. Sister. It was enough to pull Bran back but it took him a moment to get his bearings once again.

"I let you go," said the smith, "Please."

"Summer won't hurt you. I promise he won't hurt you," said Bran.

"Lord Bran, he's shaking something awful," said Sam. "Get Summer out of here." He shooed the wolf away, or tried.

"No, no," Gendry rasped between shudders, "He can...he can stay."

"You are not afraid?" Bran asked, frowning as Summer laid his large head in Gendry's calloused black hand.

"It's only...the hungry ones...you have to worry about."

Gendry's eyes closed as the milk of poppy took hold, though he continued to mutter the same things over and over again in bouts of fevered wakefulness.

"How bad is it?" Bran asked the maester in a low voice, not wanting to break Gendry's fitful sleep.

"If he survives tonight, he may have a chance."

"But the blood in his vomit...He is bleeding inside?"

"I'm 'fraid so. The bruising on the left side of his ribs may have damaged his stomach and other organs. We can only give him water and honey and a paste of whatever greens we have in the castle. Beets would be best. We'll have to replenish all the blood he has lost. There is only so much I can do for the fever. If it turns, there is a chance he will live."

Live , Bran urged the smith silently.  Live.

 

On the morrow, Gendry's fever broke. 

"You may live now," Bran said when the smith woke. "You rode a long way." 

Gendry nodded.

"Riverlands," he said hoarsely. He winced. Maester Samwell peeled away the stinking bandage from across Gendry's chest slowly, but the ragged edges of the wound stuck to the linen. Gendry looked at the deep scratches without seeing them. The stench of pus and blood did not affect him as much as it did Sam, who did his work green-faced. 

"A craven might have waited until spring to make the journey," Bran said. Sam's hands stilled. The stitches he'd made the night before had unraveled. 

"Weren't as if I had a choice between being brave or not," he said. He coughed. 

"You've opened your shoulder again," said Maester Samwell to Gendry, "I need to stitch it before it festers."

Sam handed the smith a cup of cloudy water and grudgingly Ser Gendry took it. 

"Is the worst over?" asked Bran.

"Yes, my lord," Sam replied. 

Bran left the room with a weight in his heart and made his way across the keep to the dining hall, cursing the route he had to take with his chair. There were so many repairs that still had to be done, more important things than ramps for his chair, but he was glad that there were walls and a roof to house the people remaining in Winterfell. He was glad too that Sansa's glass garden had been built before the heavy snows came again. Through the stone archways overlooking the yard, Bran could see a few men and women laying stones at the parapets of the First Keep. A few more walked by in thick cloaks through the snow with baskets of potatoes and beets. Deep beneath the stone, in the stores of Winterfell, there were rows and rows of nuts and dried berries, but only fiftyfold what the Liddles had given them so many years ago. Bran would keep his promise, and he had promised a hundred nuts and berries for every one they had been given.

Someone called, "my lord," from around the corner and he started. Bran turned to see Jaime Lannister leaning in an archway, clad in a thick wool cloak the color of Stark grey and boiled leather. Bran glanced around quickly and felt his stomach drop while the one-handed Kingslayer shifted to his other leg and crossed his arms. It was half repaired; the main floor and the ones below could be accessed, but the highest rooms, where he had seen Jaime Lannister lay with his own sister, were now barred with wood.

"I only wish to go to dinner undisturbed; my sister does not like it when I don't come."

"I don't intend to disturb you; I only wanted to know how fares the smith. Brienne has been at Lady Stark's side, else she would have asked herself."

Maester Luwin's sage voice at the back of his mind reminded Bran not to snap or grumble.

"He is doing much better. Does Brienne know him that she worries so much?"

"We both do. Ser Gendry of the Hollow Hill. Brienne owes her life to him, though perhaps he owes her a cheek. If he'd been a bit faster with a spear, Brienne the Beauty might still have half her face," said the Kingslayer gruffly.

"If that is all, you may go now. If Sansa has asked you to escort me, I won't be needing it."

"She did no such thing."

"Then why were you here?"

"A couple years ago I would have said to harass my little lord, of course, but time had made me soft and the north has cooled my temper and my Lady Sansa threatened very politely to send me on hunts where her men would inevitably leave me for the wolves should I ever speak to you in such a way."

"Should I have Hodor call on her then?"

"Hodor," offered Hodor.

"You ruin all my fun. She's at supper and won't like to be dragged away," said the Kingslayer. "You cannot hoard all the pain of this place. It's cruel. It haunts others as well."

"Perhaps the memory of your indiscretions brings you as much pain as it had given me, to wake up a crippled boy and live a crippled man," Bran spat, bristling, "I surely hope so, Kingslayer."

"I already know what it means to live a crippled man," he replied, raising his hand of gold where a flesh one ought to have been. "I don't ask for forgiveness. What I did, I did for love, no matter how misguided," Jaime said quietly, regarding the tower entrance with bitterness. He moved off the wall and walked past Bran's chair.

"Cersei was a monster," Bran called back, and he heard the footsteps behind him stall. "Joffrey was a monster. You fathered monsters and slept with monsters. You loved monsters. What does that make you, Kingslayer? You arrested my father in King's Landing. You killed Jory Cassel. You commanded the armies that took my uncle Edmure Tully, and you threw a seven year old child from a tower to keep a secret."

Bran hated himself for the flush he felt across his cheeks. Hated it, because the pain made him feel like a child, and he was once again reminded that neither his father, nor his mother, nor Robb, nor Arya would ever place a sure hand upon his shoulder and assuage the fear that sat in his stomach.

"Your sister said the same words to me."

"And what did you say to her that convinced her to trust you?"

Jaime took a deep breath, as though trying to refute the present, "Trusting me was her own decision. For me to live my life in the service of a Stark was a better way to pay my debt. That, and if I ever gave any hint of betrayal, any hint that I was still the man from King's Landing, she would take my head as she took Petyr Baelish's."

"My sister has grown claws." A year ago Bran would never have been able to imagine her taking a man's life so coldly, but the Sansa that had retaken Winterfell had a heart wrapped in Valyrian steel. 

"Long and sharp, my lord," Jaime said, with a smirk.

"As long and sharp as yours," Bran returned, unyielding. He was a wolf, the Lord of Winterfell, and he would not be mocked by one of his sister's guards. Bran parted ways with Ser Jaime Lannister to join his sister at dinner. The Great Hall of Winterfell was decorated as it always was. The single banner of a grey direwolf upon a field of white hung on the wall behind the raised Lords table. Sansa sat in the middle, and though she was not wearing any attire more grand than that of the other few nobles seated, she looked like a lady from a song with her long copper hair shining in the candlelight.

Seated at her right hand, he may be have been taller than her, as tall as their Lord Father had been, but the difference was impossible to overcome when she stood and he remained the same height. Meera told him otherwise; that he was statelier and wiser than any lord, and that mattered more than height or strength. You remember Robert Baratheon, Bran. You remember what happened to him. He was one of the strongest men in the Seven Kingdoms, and all his strength couldn't keep them together. You're a better lord than he was king. He didn't see why she had to say those things, but it made his chest ache when she did, looking more and more beautiful each passing day, something he had not an inkling of how to tell her.

The men and women seated at the long tables laughed merrily, some already into their cups. The rich scent of roasting food hung in the warm air, paltry as the dishes were. Sansa chatted with Maege Mormont about building glass gardens in the middle of the winter town. Wylla Manderly gossiped with the Alysane, the Head of Household Guard while Brienne stood stiffly behind Sansa' chair. Asha Greyjoy laughed as some man pulled her onto his lap, a cup of wine in her hand. The sparse soup had been carried away and a dish of salted potatoes replaced it by the time Hodor placed him in the Lord's chair beside Sansa. He was grateful that today her smile reached her eyes.

"The cooks have done marvelously with tonight's dinner. I am glad to see you eating with us again; I have missed your company. Were you with the blacksmith the entire time? Is he recovering well?" Sansa asked.

"He is better. He tried to get up today and reopened the scratches on his shoulder, but other than that, he's making a fine recovery. We'll have an armorer before long."

"A good worker, I pray. We need all the help we can get, and the smith in town won't be able to keep up for long. Still, to sit all night and all day. You ought to rest. You're still far too thin." The scold was gentle, but he felt it all the same and he resented it. As much as he loved her, he did not wish for her to replace Lady Catelyn. He was a man grown now. "Perhaps now that he's better you will help me with the liege lords? The men are fewer, but the requests more taxing."

"I'll hear them on the morrow," he replied. He had the decency to feel sorry for her burden. She didn't like to hear stories of men and women and children starving, people being savaged by wolves, tales of bodies found in the hills and crumbling castles. Sansa, despite her hardening, would always be the gentlest, and her stomach the weakest. 

His green dreams were not something he could escape, and this she did not quite understand. How could she? The ravens quorked and he knew their words. The trees whispered and he heard them, and when he dreamt he was whole because he didn't need legs, he didn't need a body at all. In his dreams he had wings. When he woke, he was home and he had Sansa and Hodor and Meera. It was a cruel choice that he made every morning. To wake, or to dream.

"Did you have a chance to look over the reports from the South yet?" he asked her.

"There were pages upon pages to look through. Mostly logging reports that would be better work for the steward, but there was a raven from Lady Roslin. Her boy, Brynden, has grown quite big, she says. Emmon wants to squire. She's thinking of fostering him here, though the Tyrells have extended their hands. She also says that there have been reports of bodies in the wood in the Riverlands. Some say it's a band of outlaws."

"It's not the Brotherhood, is it? Or that pack of wolves I've heard is roaming the Riverlands?"

"It could be the wolves," said Sansa worriedly. "If it is, they're moving north as fast as her raven flies. I left the Brotherhood intact but perhaps I was wrong about them. Mayhaps that's the reason Ser Gendry left them. But Lady Roslin writes that others say it's a monster, a giant. How silly," she said, laughing tightly.

"Wolves seem more likely than a giant," said Bran, "There aren't any giants south of the Gift and the Mountain was killed years ago. The Hound mayhaps? His brother? The one that razed Saltpans."

At the mention of the Hound his sister's fork paused on the way to her mouth. She set it down and stared at her plate. "The Hound is dead, Bran. He died only a little while after his brother," she said.

"Good riddance, I say. He was awful," Bran said, remembering his cruel laughter all those years ago, when he had dreams of being a knight and stared at the Kingslayer's gilded armor and white cloak with the lust of a child. Sansa had been afraid of him, surely. His scars had been ugly.

"No," she said softly. "He was awful, but he was not his brother. It doesn't matter now," she continued, "The Hound is dead."

Somehow, it did matter. It was a thing that adults did; they said one thing but they meant something else entirely. There were things a person would keep secret forever, and so he could not bring himself to ask.  Broken birds, the lot of us.

She picked at her mostly intact slice of pie for the rest of the dinner, silent and not eating a bite. Before another round of wine was brought out, she excused herself.

"I'm quite tired. I think I'll retire now, if you please. The dessert was lovely."

"Yes, of course. Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Bran."

The hall felt colder in her wake.


	2. Arya

In a tavern of Ragman's Harbor, Cat laughed with Brusco's daughters as the men drank and japed with the women on their laps. The tavern was dark and musty, as buildings in Braavos often were. On the air hung the briny odor of the sea, sweat, and spiced meat. It was a good place to hide, amongst the sailors; amongst the dark Summer Islanders with their jeweled vests and kaftans, men of the free cities with arched daggers and dirks, and pale northern knights in their heavy quilted vests and boiled leather. A man could get lost and never be found.

The evening settled into night and Ragman's Harbor was gray and foggy again. She learned that price of lumber had risen drastically and the pepper trade was being used as a cover to smuggle food into the towns and castles that were starving. She spotted the broad back of a Westerosi traveler, his large ears poking out from under a head of shaggy black hair. He sat huddled in the corner, not one patron noticing him but her.

He turned his head when a girl gave him another glass of wine, and in the dim light she caught a high cheekbone, and the line of a strong jaw. He was better looking than those washed up boys that the wars had been bringing. The free cities were turning up all sorts of people running from the east and the west alike.

The first time a man kissed her, she slit his throat and dragged him into a canal, chanting mercy, mercy, mercy. Men liked to steal kisses like fruit. Her girlhood had been wrung out of her over the years. She was nearing twenty, and hadn't yet decided if she might like kissing. Brea and Talea had decided long ago. Late at night, when she was worn from pushing her cart of clams and cockles up and down the Harbor, they would tell her stories under the covers. Brea would slip away later to meet her roof rat, and Talea would tease her endlessly when she returned.

She mocked herself for thinking the young traveler handsome, and watched the room, like Syrio Forel had taught her, and the kindly old man too. Her ears pricked at the whispers of men in the corner, and she slid silently off of her bench and crept closer in the shadows. She wished she were a cat instead of a girl; she could have hidden in the rafters and no one would be afraid at all of what she would hear. But she was a cat, and she slid into the shadows silently, away from the candlelight. The two men playing cyvasse over whispers and ale never saw nor heard her.

"The spice trade to Dorne will be ruined if the Dragon queen sets sail," complained a white-whiskered man in a green surcoat as he made his move on the board.

"Afraid her dragons will roast all your turmeric and saffron, old man?" replied his companion, in accented common tongue, Bravvosi to the bone. He was younger, lean and brown and wiry, but he took longer to make a move on the board.

"Dorne will ally with her, of course. Her brother's wife was slain by those that took her throne."

"The throne she believes is hers, you mean. Dragons, pah. That Aegon has taken the Stormlands. Perhaps Dorne will side with a son of Elia Martell rather than his aunt."

"He has sat on the Stormlands and has not made any moves into the Crownlands or the Riverlands. He ought to sail for Dorne."

"He ought to take the Crownlands and be done with the Lannisters, or take the Riverlands from the outlaws."

"It's not the outlaws that are the terror anymore." The old whiskered man leaned close to his companion, "There's an army in the Riverlands, come out of the Vale."

"I thought they'd never come off their perch and deign to fight. The Arryn child is a boy of eight, is he not? And Lysa Arryn is dead. Have the Royce's taken up arms instead?"

"The Arryn child is dead, it is a Hardyng that is the heir now. His wife is Lysa Arryn's own neice."

"Her neice?"

Cat held her heart in her throat.

"Sansa Stark, from what I hear. She's going to take back Winterfell."

She wanted to laugh. Sansa didn't know how to command an army. The only thing she had command over was the high harp, and all she knew of war was battles in the songs. This one was a fake, like the Arya Stark that they married to the Bastard of Bolton years ago.

"Winterfell 'ent nothing but bones."

"But with a Stark sitting there again…"

Couldn't these men tell lies from the truth? Sansa was gone. Her heart thrummed and her hands shook, tingling oddly. She clenched her fists hard, her nails in her palms to stop the shaking. _Calm as still water. Quiet as a shadow. The man who fears losing has already lost._

"Her armies won't make it there."

"She'll be welcomed with open arms."

"Aye, then Bolton will flay the pretty skin right o' her."

She closed her eyes and wished to be anything but a cat. Her training was a hard teacher, firm and implacable. _Valar dohaeris_. She had been blind Beth, the ugly little girl, Mercy, a comely girl with a silly heart for songs under Izembaro's hand. She shed her name and face as easily as her clothes when her time was done. _Cat you will be again,_ the kindly man had said. _But you will work for the Sealord._ She'd been a spy as long as she could remember, but now there was a reason to her secrets.

She watched a few men exchange coin with tavern wenches and disappear upstairs, but for the most part the men in the corner continued to throw knives at the painted panel on the wall and a few older captains with dark skin and thick black beards played cyvasse and japed about the dragon queen. The man with the large ears from before left his table and Cat glanced at him, seeing his face for the first time that night.

For a moment, she couldn't move. In the dim light of the candles she had mistaken him...no...not him. It couldn't be him. There was blood in her ears, pounding like the sound of a drum.

With her wool cloak on her shoulders, she followed him out the door of the tavern and onto the small street along the canal. He had lifted his hood over his head, but a man nearly grown that breached far past six feet tall was not a man that could hide easily from anyone, and especially not her. He strode along the narrow cobbled path, skirting aside drunken men and painted whores. Quiet as a shadow, Cat padded along behind him in her deerskin slippers until he disappeared into an alleyway and headed towards a block of apartments. It was too cold to go barefoot so deep into winter. She climbed onto the low roof of the house, silently moving up over a balcony and onto the cold tiles. He slunk through the alleyway only half as careful as he should have been watched him slink through the alleyway and came up behind him without a noise, a dagger at his throat. He struggled, trying to claw her off his back, but the blade at his throat was sharp and soon her hands were covered in blood. He fell to his knees and she took the chance to press him against the stone of the alleyway.

"Stop," she hissed in his ear, "If you stop I won't kill you." He stilled and she lay the flat of her dagger against his skin.

"Take whatever coin I have," he said, his voice trembling. She yanked the hood off his head and grabbed a chunk of his shaggy black hair, dark as a raven's wing, and pulled. He cried out.

"Why are you here?" Cat hissed. His face was a pale blue in the moonlight and untouched by scars or weather.

"Hi...hi...hiding."

"You liked the outlaw life so much you decided to come here?"

"What...what, no! I'm not an outlaw!"

She dug the knife deeper, unafraid to cut, but then she heard it. A whimper. It made her stop, and look. His eyes were blue. The very same color, the very same shape. But his cheeks were not so wide, and his jaw was weaker. The beard on his face was short and thin; a boy's beard and not a man's, his brows weren't so thick, and his ears – how could it have been him? Stupid girl, she thought, stupid, stupid girl. Syrio would have chastised her for such a mistake.

"You're not him," said Arya after a moment. She felt the hard knot of his throat move under her knife as he swallowed.

"No! No! I'm not him!"

"But you look like him. Why do you look like him?" she spat.

"He's dead!" the man said, his eyes wide and glittering in the light. "You don't have to worry about him, he's dead, you must have heard! Everyone's heard for years!"

His words rang in her head as she brought the dagger to the man's throat and cut. He seemed to realize at the last moment that she was only a scrawny girl and wrested out of her grip, tossing her onto the ground with all his strength. She took the dagger and leapt, but he turned from her and the blade cut into the flesh of his shoulder.

"King Robert's dead! He's been dead for seven years!" he yelled, striking out. He clipped the top of her head and she fell backwards, breathing heavily, dizzy. She was fast but he had been too strong.

"What's wrong with you, you crazy girl? He's dead, I'm not him. I don't know you. I'm not my father."

He held his hand over his neck, blood leaking from under his fingers. She felt like she had been dropped in a frozen river.

"What do you want with me?" he asked, his voice trembling again. He should have had the good sense to run, "Are you going to kill me? Did someone pay you to kill me?"

"No," Cat said.

"What...what do you want from me?"

"Your name."

He laughed darkly.

"People are looking for me, people who want me dead."

"If I wanted you dead you would have been a corpse long ago."

"Edric Storm."

"King Robert's bastard."

"Yes."

She unsheathed Needle from her scabbard and placed the tip of the blade on his leather jerkin, over his heart between the ribs.

"Run home," she said. "You won't die today."

He scrambled up and broke into a run, still holding the cloth to his neck. Her head reeled painfully. _I must never slip again like that._ But she did slip and would again and again. She slipped into a wolf's skin at night and ran upon the frozen ground with her brothers and sisters. Every night the snow was thicker and the men in the woods sparser. Live ones, at least. In the wolf dreams she had a pack that would never leave her. Her normal dreams were only nightmares.

She sank to her knees in the dirty alleyway, the slush from last night's snow soaking through her breeches. A chilling fear, wild and savage, crawled up her back. _One day I will lose every memory I have. I have thought that by coming here I would live, but Arya will die anyways. Arya will die and I will have killed her._

 


	3. Sansa

Sansa woke shivering in the dead of night to the howling of wolves. She tossed aside her tangled blankets and furs, and pulled a robe of heavy wool over her shoulders. The unearthly chorus awaited her as she opened the shutters at the end of her bedchamber, letting in the cold winter air. Over the tops of the snow-capped pines of the Wolfswood and the parapets of the keep, Sansa felt the echo of the wolves. The old foxhound who slept on the rug beside her bed whined, his blind eyes unseeing.

It was still not yet dawn when she left her rooms, dressed in dove gray wool with Tully red velvet trim; the embroidered fish and direwolves made by her own hand. Brienne did not accompany her as she strode through the dark keep, still and silent save for the scurry of a tawny cat, and a guard whose patrol had ended.

In the yard, she saw the scattered sentries on the parapets; huddled near glowing watch fires to keep out the cold. The wind went through her like a knife despite her thick shifts, stockings, underskirts. It would be colder still on the parapet, but she was restless and needed to see something, anything. There was neither snow nor the gray clouds like pillars of smoke which heralded it, only thin wisps of cloud above and beyond lay the stars. She could make out the bright blue eye of the Ice Dragon, showing the way North.

She heard the howls again, muffled in the tower with the stairs to Winterfell's inner wall. When she reached the top, the sentry there bowed low.

"M'lady," he said, "Did the wolves wake you?"

"I was not sleeping so well in the first place. Have you caught sight of them?" asked Sansa.

"No, m'lady, but perhaps when the sun rises." Shadd pointed with his good hand towards the east, over the towers of Winterfell, to the strip of gray dawn at the horizon. "I never heard so many wolves in my life," shuddered the sentry.

"Winter is coming," was all she said, but the sentry smiled tiredly as though receiving good news. He turned back to his vigil and left her to watch the night grow old. The sky turned to gray, and Shadd's duty was done for the night. Slowly, the night yielded and cast the world deep cobalt. The west was no longer a black sea of spotted hearth fires and sentry tower and the moat glittered below in the torchlight and deep from the inky forest the howls came again.

"A bad omen, I say, my lady," said Asha Greyjoy from behind Sansa, startling her. Today the address was only a little mocking.

"One day you will not laugh at me, Lady Asha," said Sansa, gazing over the main wall of Winterfell's keep. I once built Winterfell out of snow on a morning like this. She touched her fingers to her lips and shivered, feeling ill. Petyr is gone, I must remember. Sansa had seen his head roll across the bone-dry winter grass of the Riverlands.

"One day," said Lady Asha Greyjoy, who came to stand beside Sansa, her breath coming out in white puffs. Under her fur cloak her leathers were stained by a layer of salt, valiantly hanging on after all the years ashore. It was hard to call her a lady, though she had been the daughter of a king once.

"I think we ought to see how big the pack really is. Summer was howling something terrible," Sansa said. The howls must have kept Bran awake all through the night, or perhaps he had been in Summer's skin, howling the omen himself. A chill crawled down her spine. Warging. Sorcery.

"A hundred. Mayhaps more. When sharks swarm in the sea it means theres blood in the water."

"Blood," said Sansa, her breath condensing into mist before her face. "That's what I'm afraid of. And I'm to risk my men to protect Wintertown and the smallfolk. Men will die today."

"They're good for dying," said Asha, and shifted the axe on her hip.

"You could go too. Nothing keeps you."

Lady Asha scoffed.

"Aye, and get lost in this wood. I'd think not. Better drowned than starved in the snow; I've been close and don't recommend it as a way to die."

"Lost? After all the time you spend up here, watching the trees?"

"I come only for a taste of salt on the wind," said Asha Greyjoy. "I stay for my brother."

"Is vengeance worth it?" Sansa asked.

"I saw him with mine own eyes, Lady Stark. All his smiles and all his youth, gone in the space of a year. I'd kill the bastard over and over again for a hundred years if I could. You might understand. He nearly did the same to the poor girl posing as your sister."

She had not seen Arya since King's Landing, a thousand years ago. Before winter, before autumn. Before Joffrey had ever had her beaten and stripped, before Joffrey had cut off her father's head and called it mercy. There were rumors of Arya all across Westeros. Some said she died in King's Landing. Others said she lived to be wife to the Bolton bastard. Arya died at the Twins with her mother and Robb. Arya died on the road north, stolen by a stranger in a storm. Arya died when the Bastard of Bolton's pet took her from a ravaged castle.

"Jeyne Poole is at Deepwood Motte, safe," said Sansa. Safe, but not unharmed. One day the snows would melt and Sansa would have to face her old friend who she had unknowingly sold into Littlefinger's hands. Into Ramsay Snow's. Sansa felt ill. "As for my true sister, she is dead."

"So is my true brother," said Asha, unsmiling. "But I aim only to serve the justice he deserved alive."

"Do you hate us, as Theon did?"

"As Theon did," she mused. "Your father only took him from home. Ramsay Snow did much worse."

"When it comes time for Ramsay Snow to die, you shall have him," decided Sansa.

"The time for the bastard to die was the day his mother birthed him." Asha watched the dawn for a moment before saying, "May the men who try to stop me pray to their gods."

The Ironborn woman smiled, but her eyes did not; Sansa found a similar expression on her own face often. Too long I was Petyr's daughter. But while the years had turned Sansa hard and quiet, Asha's made her bitter and wild. She was like Arya that way. With her little sword and fierceness, Arya would have made many a lord weep. Alone in the godswood at dusk, Sansa could sometimes hear the echoes of her sister's laughter.

Together their footsteps crunched in the frozen ground as they crossed to the main keep. Sansa could smell bread baking in the kitchens and the rustling of the castle waking. She watched her men rise. There was Wybert saddling his gelding in the yard, and the Cassel boys sharing a steaming loaf of bread before their mounts. Cley Cerwyn downed steaming wine from a flask. She watched her men rise and she watched her men go. There are faces I may never see smile again. Her stomach churned, but she watched the gate until there was not a single man she could see on the road.

"M'lady, there's been a raven for you, and a parcel," said Maester Samwell's serving boy, bowing low in front of her.

"Thank you," she said. Sansa buried her dread and her fear where she always had and smiled at the boy. "I pray for good news."

"Maester Samwell left it in your solar, m'lady," he bowed again and ran off through the snow.

With Brienne at her side, Sansa left the yard. Up and up she climbed the stairs to her solar. The fire there was low and the room cold. She asked for someone to be sent about the fire, and sat down at her table with a heavy sigh, a shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. It was covered in small neat piles of letters, some with red seals, some with gray, green, black, blue, even gold, all of them full of offers of daughters for Bran and sons for Sansa. If Rickon and Arya had been alive, if there had been even a notion in any part of Westeros they were alive, there would be offers for them too.

"I am so tired of these offers of marriage. Twice wedded already, and both my husbands dead. One would think these Southron lords would be more careful about their second sons."

"They're ambitious my lady."

"Ambition only gets one killed. If Bran would hear a single one of these marriage requests…some of these girls come with quite a dowry. But of course, he refuses to even listen. He's six and ten, as old as Robb was when he wed."

"He wants to marry the Reed girl," Brienne supplied.

"Howland has not given a word. We can't make a betrothal. And no dowry? Surely he would supply one. He was my father's friend."

A girl came in and built up the fire to roaring and left quickly. It was only with the door firmly closed and the guard dismissed she dared open the parchment atop the parcel, which was long and thin and light, wrapped in a cloth of white velvet patterned with silver thread. The note bore the black seal of House Targaryen. Perhaps Sansa imagined the scent of smoke on the parchment. For a moment she resented her duty. She wanted a husband and pretty dresses and to sing and play her harp, not to constantly negotiate with the queen and Southron lords. A girlish want.

"I am fine, Brienne. Perhaps a cloth, though." Sansa didn't want to stain her dress.

Sansa untied the white silk ribbons that held it together at each end. The cloth fell open and Sansa's breath caught in her throat. It was Widow's Wail, the blade red like half dried blood. Joffrey had cut her lord husband's gift in half with that sword. Sansa had wanted to tell him that Joffrey would prefer something he could kill with or look proud in. He had never seen the value of a book.

She felt dizzy and numb, like a dream.

They say this sword once bore the name Ice. I have returned it as per your request to right the wrongs done to House Stark. In return I demand your presence on my council before the end of Winter. You have refused me many times to leave before your castle has been secured and rebuilt. I understand this, though you must know if you never swear fealty, the North will be branded again a traitor. I have dragons, Lady Stark, and you have only snow and stone.

Daenerys Stormborn

Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains.

Sansa Stark sat unmoving for some time, the letter pushed aside on her desk so she would not have to look. I ask for freedom and she hands me a sword so I may cut off my own head. May the grayscale take her dragons, and her castle crumble to dust. Her heart hammered with the pace of her worries, flickering in and out of her mind until she could not hold her silence any longer.

"The Queen wants me to sit court in King's Landing," said Sansa, feeling dizzy and numb. This is no dream. Ilyn Payne took my father's head with that blade. "That placed is cursed. I won't go back. How can I leave Bran? We were so long apart, and together so short."

"You will get your independence, my lady. She won't have you."

"If this winter lasts as long as I live, she will not," Sansa said. I promised my mother I would see Robb's crown and Winterfell rebuilt. But had she made a promise to her mother or only a shade; a ruined husk of the body that had once loved her, held her, nursed her, brushed her hair? Sansa sighed.

"Is Bran awake?"

"No, my lady. He sleeps since yesterday morning. Old Nan is with him."

"How long will this go on? I can't hold court without him."

"I don't know, my lady."

Sansa sighed. "This worry in my heart will not cease. Mayhaps a bath...no," she shook her head. "A walk? I don't know."

"Mayhaps you could pray, my lady."

"The Godswood," Sansa agreed.

They walked.

"Can Ser Gendry reforge Ice?" Sansa asked Brienne, who frowned in thought.

"I can't say m'lady. I can ask."

"No, it should be me, or Bran. I ought to visit him, shouldn't I? After what he did…and this journey north, how difficult it must have been," she said.

"He's a bitter man, m'lady. Broken and uncouth. You won't find grace or manners in him, no matter his royal blood."

"I am not like Arya, to be sure, but I'm not so cold as to scorn his birth."

 

"Lady Sansa?"

Sansa looked up from the letter in her lap to the thin man lying on the cot. She smiled kindly, waiting for him to wake fully, the letter tucked away into her sleeve.

"I'm sorry if I woke you."

"No, m'lady," came Ser Gendry's groggy and strained voice from the cot. Sansa had not seen Ser Gendry herself since the night he dragged himself inside the gates of Winterfell, half dead. Her men found the carcass of his horse in the woods the next morning, and returned with what they could salvage of his packs and saddle. There was not much. It was a week before his fever abated and another week before he was fit to leave the room. Bran would sit with Ser Gendry occasionally, finding some mystery there he wanted to solve, but more often Bran was abed.

"Are you recovering well?"

"Yes, m'lady," he supplied, struggling to bow his head while only half propped by a pillow. "It's very kind of you to visit, m'lady."

"None of the others came with you?" she asked.

"No, m'lady." He was silent, the shadow of anger on his weathered, ungroomed face.It's Robert he resembles most of all. Her father's fables of Robert and his warhammer no longer seemed fanciful, though he must have been far more refined to be worthy of a crown. Even Mya Stone, with her similar stolid silence, who spoke rarely and curtly, had the traces of a lady's grace. A bull and a mule. A fitting pair of siblings, thought Sansa. She tried to think of the others, but only Edric Storm came to mind, who no one had seen in nigh ten years. Of all of King Robert's sons and daughters, it was a bastard smith from Flea Bottom in the walls of Winterfell. A different Sansa might have found it hard to not be disappointed. Robert's blood looking for Lyanna's bones. It might have made a fanciful song for silly Sansa if not for her father's words; Robert had loved her aunt Lyanna's absence more tenderly than her presence, her memory more than who she was. Sansa supposed she knew enough of dreaming to understand.

"I'm sorry," she said, "for what Lady Stoneheart did," gesturing to the twisted line of white and pink flesh at his neck. My mother's ghost would have hung the Dragon Queen and ended this ridiculous game. I never wanted to play. I only wanted to go home. Gendry absently ran his hand, thickly calloused and dark, across the scar.

"It weren't your fault, m'lady." He shifted against the pillows, pushing himself into a sitting position. He watched her carefully while he did, as if afraid his movement would displease her. The mangled skin that peeked from underneath his bandages stretched across his collarbone.

"Maester Samwell has told me you have become restless. More than two weeks is a long time to lie in a sickbed. I told him I would walk with you around the keep, if you are feeling well enough."

"If you wish, m'lady," he blinked.

"It is," said Sansa. "I am sick of my solar, and the castle is empty of faces. Our best men have gone to see to the wolf pack."

"Wolves, m'lady?" he asked, frowning.

"The pack is monstrous, a man from town says. He says the alpha is larger than any natural wolf, thirstier for blood than any hungry wolf he has known." She saw Ser Gendry shudder and felt the urge to spare him memories of his attack, "I think it could be a very frightened man speaking his fears, but we will hear the news when the men return, and for now we will walk."

"I've no proper clothes, m'lady," he said.

"I had some brought up not too long ago. I will wait with Brienne," said Sansa primly, but kindly.

"As you say, m'lady," he deferred.

The Maid of Tarth waited outside the door, her eyes pretty against her sapphire blue tunic of velvet and wool, a gray cloak trimmed in silver fox fur on her shoulders, and Oathkeeper at her hip. Sansa regretted her having to part with it.

"You are alright, my lady?" asked Brienne.

"Fine, Brienne," said Sansa, but her heart was still heavy and her mind racing back and forth from letter to letter, dowry to dowry, trade alliance to trade alliance. It would never end. For years she had woven Petyr's plans together, and for years she had undone them in the quiet of night, but now she was weaving herself a shroud, and no one could unravel her from it. She would end like Petyr, drowning in plots too grand for her. Despair settled in the place where her heart should have been. Arya would have not bothered with schemes and plots. Arya would have befriended the whole kitchen staff, the stableboys and kennelmasters and armorers too. She would have swept up her liege lords and made friends of them so dear they'd drop everything at her rallying call. She would not have thought of men like pieces on a board of cyvasse. Perhaps Sansa Stark is really dead, and all that's left is Petyr's bastard daughter.

The door opened and the smith emerged, tugging at the too-short sleeves of his woolen tunic.

"You are looking much better, Ser Gendry," Sansa supplied kindly. To be sure, he looked less a corpse than he had at the gates.

"Yes, m'lady," Ser Gendry replied, bending his neck stiffly.

"It is good to see you well, Ser Gendry," said Brienne. Gendry returned with a silent nod.

"I thought a short tour of the keep to be best. You must be very careful not to strain yourself overmuch," said Sansa, "but Brienne is here should you not feel well suddenly."

"Yes, m'lady."

They walked together from the servant's quarters. Gendry treaded slowly, carefully, as if every step was a bargain with the Stranger, but Sansa did not push him as she walked beside him with Brienne. Her woolen gown and fox fur trimmed cloak trailed with a whisper upon the stone floor.

As they walked, the history of Winterfell sprang forth from Sansa, who was unable to bear Ser Gendry's silence. They passed great stone carvings, scorched in places, shields and tapestries old and new. She told him of Bran the Builder, and the giants who raised the granite walls of the keep; she told him of magic and of heroes long dead, of the spring water which ran in veins through the very walls of stone. Gendry stared at the walls, and once reached out as if to touch them, but pulled his hands back and clasped them tightly once again.

"He raised the castle of Storm's End from the sea, Winterfell from the center of the earth, and the Wall he built from the heavens themselves. He was the first King in the North," she recited, "And after, the generation of Kings went unbroken until Torrhen Stark, who bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror.

"Some time after the first Brandon came Theon the Hungry Wolf, whose kingdom was ravaged by war, and he grew lean and hungry for it. Brandon the Shipwright built a ship to cross the Summer Sea, and was never seen again. His crypt is empty. In grief, his son burned his father's fleet. They called him Brandon the Burner. There came King Jonnel and King Dorren, who lived when the children of the forest traded with the Night's Watch. When the rangers fought off giants and mammoths. And after them came Jon Stark who built the White Harbor, and his son Rickard who took the Neck for the North, after defeating the Marsh King and marrying his daughter. They all lived here, slept here, ate here, prayed here."

"The North has a long history, my lady," Brienne said, heaving open the pale door leading to the godswood.

"I seem to have learned it all by heart," said Sansa. "I spent so long wishing for this place my studies from so long ago decided to take root. I was hopeless at sums though - Arya was always better than me. And riding. I was a terrible horsewoman." If only I had Arya, Sansa thought. and turned to Gendry again, whose face was pulled into the same deep frown he oft wore. She had bored the man enough. Picking her skirts up, she walked away from the Godswood.

"M'lady?"

"Yes, Ser Gendry?"

"M'lady, is there...I mean, would it be possible..." he chewed heavily over his words, his hands knotted together. "May I see the Godswood, m'lady?"

"Yes, of course, if I have not exhausted you with stories and staircases," Sansa said.

"I'd...I'd like to pray, m'lady," said Ser Gendry. His voice was strung with uncertainty, as if the words had been unearthed after decades of silence; his voice long unused and too rough, too frail, too mortal to hold under the weight of what he meant to say. Sansa had once known a man with a voice like a rasp.

"I would never deny a man his gods, Ser Gendry," she said, and let him walk alone into the Godswood.

"I doubt he was ever fond of the Lord of Light, but I would not have thought him fond of any gods," said Brienne from behind Sansa.

"A man has a right to choose his gods."

"A southern man praying to northern gods. It's an odd sight, my lady."

In the distance, she could see only Gendry's head of black hair and the gray cloak on his broad back.

"What do you pray for, Brienne?"

"I pray for peace, my lady. I pray I will never break my oath to Lady Catelyn. I pray I do not break my oaths to you."

"Those are good prayers, Brienne."

"And you, my lady?"

"I pray for my sister. I pray for Rickon's return. I pray for my father's soul, as I pray for my mother's and for Robb's. I pray our men return today unharmed. I pray they return my father's bones. I pray for peace and I pray for justice and I pray I have the wisdom to know the difference." A long time ago she had prayed for the Mother to gentle the Hound, but the Hound was dead now. Robb too. I prayed for Robb to win the war and take me home, but the gods saw fit to slay him under the guest right.

"I will find her, my lady. I would search for a hundred years if you willed it."

Sansa laid a hand on Brienne's arm, warm and solid under the wool.

"She will return. She will, and so will Rickon."

Perhaps I shall write a song for the only true knight left, and she is not even anointed.

Brienne's face betrayed nothing but duty, and she bent to bow. Clamor in the yard stopped her and she turned her head to the sound, as did Gendry, who was still alone in the Godswood. Arriving like the rush of a flood over a river, she heard yells and shouts carry over the walls. Sansa's heart stuttered in fear.

Please, let no one be dead.

But the gods were cruel; that much Sansa knew was true as she later stared numbly at the ruined, mangled throat of a crofter, the flesh ripped from the half crushed bone, windpipe gone. His name was Osric, Sansa remembered as she looked upon the body brought into the yard. He used to bring my mother his best turnips.

"A black wolf, m'lady," sobbed his daughter, a girl no older than Sansa. "A black wolf large as a pony, and teeth like bear."

From the center of the keep, Summer howled.


	4. Arya II

"Shoo, shoo old cat," screeched a woman from the balcony, swaddled in wool and odd scraps of pilfered silk. A scarf whipped at her leg and she yowled, leaping out the window onto the balcony and up onto the roof. She shook her head and then she was a girl again, on a different roof, though very alike.

The sun was low in the sky, a dim white shimmer through the gray mist which hung damply over the canals. The sea breeze nipped upon the narrow pointed roof where she perched, high above the boy at the bridge. She did not blame him for coming to the water as the sun fell, to watch the stormy sea out beyond the legs of the Titan of Braavos. The boy knew storm and sea as she knew the cold and the snow. The mist turned from white to blue. The sun must have set somewhere beyond the clouds. She might have forgotten where East and West were; she has not seen a clear sky since the start of Winter.

The boy named Edric Storm, with a ghosts' face and ears like a Dornish mouse turned from the bridge and melted away into the passing crowd. He would have one less eye upon him tonight — a thousand, instead of a thousand and one. She stood and stretched her legs. Tonight she had a job to finish.

When the pins left her foot she leapt deftly over the alley onto the next roof. On and on she went, her feet in their slippers pattering across the cold tiles like drops of rain. In the street between two houses, the squid vendor sat huddled in wools, roasting tentacles in the fire. They sizzled and cracked, and the sweet smell wafted up into the damp air. Cat felt a drizzle begin to come down on her skin. The rain was so light she could barely feel it, but it was there; the cold patter of raindrops on her skin. Her stomach growled. She crawled down and gave the vendor a secret for a tentacle.

She ate it with relish underneath the awning of his cart. The fire was warm there. Her hunger abated and she took off into the alleyway.Cat ran on for a little while, taking care not to slip on slick roof tiles as the people of Braavos slunk into their homes and locked the doors for the night. She stopped for a moment to watch the glimmer of the Drowned Town, all the way across the water. She imagined all the ghosts still living in those houses, children laughing and lovers sighing and families still keeping each other warm underneath the sunken stone and heavy water.

Through an open window below her, she heard the giggles of children and a mother's scold. They echoed in the space within her where there ought to have been the laughter of brothers and sisters, of a mother and father, and of friends too. But nothing was there, only the steady thump of her heart against her ribs. It too could have been an echo. The shutters below her closed, and the Braavos of daytime, with its damp and solemn gloom, gave away to the Braavos of night.

By the Moon Pool she watched the bravos fight, the fountain scattering torchlight across the great stone front of the Iron Bank. Little ripples of fresh water shone through the cracks in the thin film of ice. She brushed her dampened hair out of her eyes where it had fallen out of her braid and climbed down from the rooftop.

"You want to spar, little cat?" one bravo asked her, clad in fine purple silks, shivering in his light cloak and itching to fight.

The impulse to fight came crawling up her spine, but she killed it swiftly. She had gotten good at killing her whims, and good at killing. She looked up at the dying sliver of the moon. I can serve. I can serve as well as anyone. But the kindly man told her her pride was bigger even than her anger. I have nothing left but pride, thought Arya Stark.

"She doesn't have a sword with her," laughed another, "But you can give her one, Bereo."

"My sword? I won this from a knight, you camel cunt."

"From a fat toad, more like. I haven't seen you in nigh a moon. I would have won a nice flagon of wine to keep me warm had you not been there. Where are your cockles and clams, little cat?"

"Up your arse, Temolo," said Cat in accented Braavosi, "Where lie the rest of your brains."

Temolo, in his deerskin breeches and salt cracked brown boots laughed at her, though the other two bravos laughed harder.

"Would a sword of Braavos sell cockles and clams at the market?" she asked archly.

"Just so, little cat," said Bereo.She gave the bravos a flourished bow and took off with a laugh, clutching Bereo's amethyst sash in her hand as she leapt upon a wide stone patio, and then upon a roof.

"Just so," she called, and when they were out of sight, she wrapped the scarf about her hair. The house with the red door was not so hard to find. It wasn't a manse, or a palace like the Sealord's, but a three storied block of smooth pale stone with arched windows. It was flanked on either side by a garden, gated with iron, and then by more houses on each side. The canal came right under the house, a canal boat painted red and black and gold moored to a post. The red door stood before her, bright as blood in the gray stone.

Rains had peeled the paint away at the bottom. It made her feel like she were visiting a friend, but it couldn't be true. _A girl is no one, a girl does not have friends, a girl does not know places she has never been,_ she told herself. She touched the door once, running her fingers over the paint. It flaked away under her hand.

The Darry house, some called it, where Lord Willem Darry had taken Daenerys Stormborn and her brother Viserys after the Targaryen Dynasty fell. She was now the Mother of Dragons, but her brother was dead. A girl heard many things in Braavos; a girl heard whispers of dragons and tales of sorcery in the mists of morning and damp of night. She broke the chains but her dragons are her masters. She will lead the world to another Doom. She had not told the kindly man these whispers; they were not things she knew. They were things fisherman and old wives hissed in each other's ears. Arya wondered how mad she could be if she killed the masters and freed the slaves. Everyone else seemed to want it backwards.

It was not hard to find a window she could climb into; they were all tall and wide, the shutters cracked open where the latches had been broken by thieves. When she peeked in, she found cobwebs and broken furniture, upon which dust had long settled. Cloth covers had been ripped or stolen and the tapestries gone from the walls, leaving odd pale patches in the stone. The carpets had all been rolled up and set aside, leaving only cold stone peppered with prints from little shoes. There was broken glass on the floor, and the black glittering stones nearly all pried out from the legs of a settee. It had once had crimson cushions, but now there were only tatters of red silk still clinging to the wood. All the down stuffing had fallen out.

She closed her eyes and caught the scent of a tallow candle put out. Cat crept more quietly than she ever had. Even her breaths were silent, held between the gusts of wind against the shutters. The walls kept out the wind, but not the cold. She still shivered in her wool layers and thin slippers. The room was black save for the slivers of pale moonlight from the shutters. Across the house, one banged and rattled in the wind. _Calm as still water._

There was no candle in the room, only a drop of wax on the floor. She followed the way it pointed, through the splintered and warped wood doors and down the dusty marble stair, stepping in the prints made before her.

"Only the shutters, old friend," came a soft voice from below. She leaned over the cracking marble banister and saw the faint and flickering glow of candlelight. She held her breath.

"They ought to be sealed shut once and for all."

"How will the birds get in?"

"They'll find a way. We did, if you don't remember."

"I did, you mean. You'd think the Lord of Cheese could stay in the sealord's palace. But I hear Tormo Fregar and yourself had a few youthly disagreements."

"I don't need another spat with that puffed up old goat, not when we're on the cusp of making our very own civil war in your piss-pot kingdom," said the Lord of Cheese.

"I was comfortable there, until the Imp decided to run me out because of his personal quarrel with daddy." His voice was soft, and as tame as a pit viper. "Oh well," he sighed, "That life is over, and this one is here. I managed a bit of work before I had to leave. Lannisters," he tutted. "It was a shame he had to be competent. It nearly ruined all our years of planning. Still, I'd much rather be in Pentos than here. Your house is much nicer than this one."

"Your soft heart let the Imp live. You always were one for attachments."

"Better than a man with cheese and gold and hired help for friends. All you have is allies where you ought to have friends. You had your own soft hearted moments. Daenerys was meant to grow old and dragonless in the Grass Sea, and yet, she is sailing out of Slaver's bay as we speak, and heading west. You gave a Targaryen dragon's eggs. Tell me it was not sentimentality which kept you from slitting her and her brother's throats in the night."

"I don't get my hands dirty."

"You're wading in a cistern where the water's over your wobbly chins, but you hold your hands in the air and call yourself clean-handed."

The man laughed, full bellied."It is good to see you again after so long," said the magister.

"It was not long enough," said the spider.

"I was never here, old friend."

"Of course. You're taking the boy?"

"Someone will need to be lord of Storm's End. Someone we can train. _Valar Dohaeris_."

Edric Storm would vanish from Braavos. His accusing and curious eyes would never again find her at the top of a roof. Big and solemn and blue as a bruise. All her friends left. Did he even know he was being sold that night? He had finally mastered haggling for good oysters.

"Grooming another bastard for another throne. Do you ever grow weary?"

"Weary, no. I have the time and the gold to rest. But I grow gouty and I grow old and I grow bored."

"You are right." The eunuch's soft voice was resigned, and his sigh echoed off the walls. "We are dust, you and I. And soon we will both be food for worms. The crows will dine upon us for weeks, mayhaps months, and the world will keep turning. Perhaps a girl or boy much like you or I, stealing food and holding secrets in their heart will sell their secrets for a rung on a ladder, and will find their way out of a pit."

"We will die, yes, but I will live long enough to see the dragons and their mother turn from flesh to cold unfeeling stone. I will see my boy on the throne and I will see the world learn how true rulers are made; not by blood but by teaching." She heard the scrape of chair upon stone and a great grunting heave. "But I have things I must first finish here. You have the book?"

"I do. It will be given to him. The boy will be at the docks, on your ship. Go to your banker."

"Until we meet again, old friend."

"Yes, until then. If your gout doesn't take you."

Magister Illyrio's footsteps were light on the tiles as he vanished down into cellar, where his canal boat was waiting to take him to the harbor. Outside, she heard the hiss of water beneath a rowman's oars, and then vanished too under the howl of the wind and the whisper of the town. The light of the candle left the room below, but she smelled no smoke. She crept down the stairs silently. There was no one left in the room, only the table where the two men had sat. There was light in the corridor, and she followed it.

"What are you doing here, child?"The voice came from behind her. She started. The candle guttered out and the world was dark.

"Looking for something to sell," said Cat.

"There's nothing to sell here but secrets," said Varys.

"I have some secrets." She sashayed behind a table, careful to be silent. Her eyes adjusted to the trickle of moonlight. In the Spider's hands she saw a book so old the binding upon the spine was missing — a hundred or more sheaves of parchment held together only by cracked leather and a string of catgut. _Shouldn't have brought it with him,_ she thought. _Now my job is too easy._

"Come closer, child. So I may see your face."

She giggled, like Mercy would have. "I'll stay here," she said, stalking around the edges of the room, circling the once-perfumed eunuch. He hadn't smelled sweet in years, and she didn't trust the Spider to be as frail as his beggar's vestments implied.

"Who are you, pterza petito?" he said. "You could make more money with me than selling trinkets." The shadows shifted and his eyes darted, trying to catch hers.

"I'm not a little bird. I don't want to work for you. You're putting a bastard into Storm's End. Did you put a bastard girl in Sansa Stark's place too?"

"A northern girl would know that Ned Stark has only one bastard." In his soft fleshy face, behind the thick mat of dark hair and beard, his eyes were hard and crinkled like a man who knew enough.

"He was Lord Commander of the Night's Watch until his men murdered him." She kept her face a mask, but even half a decade after the news, her heart ached. _Cat had no brothers, and couldn't mourn their smile._

"So you know. But he serves his post again, by the Red God's magic." Arya's hurting heart stopped. Not a breath left her in the seconds that followed. "Now you owe me a secret, girl. Tell me why you're here."

 _The book,_ she thought, trying to find it in the dark, but it disappeared from his hands. In her haste, her heart hammering to make up for the seconds it did not beat, she had crept too close to the eunuch.

He grabbed her throat and threw her against a cold marble wall. Arya writhed and flailed. He gave a grunt when her heel collided with his knee and her elbow with his soft stomach. But she couldn't get out of his iron grip. Her dagger was too far from her fingertips and she'd never felt quite so stupid. Then a dagger – her dagger – was at her throat. "The gods have been good; this city has spat up for me Arya Stark of Winterfell."

She sagged against the wall. Her pulse fluttered in her throat against his soft, sweaty hand.

"What will you do with me?"

"Shh, child. Take care of you, of course."

"Sell me. Sell me like Edric, you mean. Sell me like you sold Prince Aegon and Daenerys Stormborn and her brother."

"I never sold a soul. How could I, knowing what it felt like?"

"Seems you've mastered it easily enough," she hissed. She twisted against his weakening arms and turned enough to rear her head back. Beneath her skull, the eunuch's nose gave a sickening crush. Blood sprayed her hair. She slipped out of his hands like an eel. In the same motion, she stole back her dagger and shoved it through the Spider's throat.

He fell to the ground, heavier than his footsteps suggested. From his gaping red throat, blood gurgled onto the marble floor and trickled through her slippers. Shaking, she pried the ancient book from his hands. _He could have wanted to take me home, like Edric_ , she thought suddenly. But that was a stupid thought. Winterfell was gone, and all she had left was some Sansa impostor in the Riverlands. _Jon,_ a voice in her head said, y _ou have Jon._ She slipped in the pool of blood and fell hard on her hands and knees. How could her brother have been alive all these years without her knowing? She did not dare think any more of it. Arya scrambled up, grabbed the book, and ran.


	5. Brienne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to start off with saying thank you to all of you who are reading this after patiently waiting many, many, months for this chapter. I'm very happy to finally be posting it, and it's thanks to everyone who commented and gave me feedback that I am able to post it now. You will notice this is Chapter Five, and may remember that a chapter five was published with my last update. Things have been moved around. A little bit of the content in the previous chapters has changed because of a lot (and i mean A LOT) of plot line shuffling on my part these past few months. The changes aren't unbelievably significant, but you may want to reread or skim the previous chapter in this timeline (Chapter 3: Sansa). Anyways, happy reading, and I hope to get your feedback.

"You'll take these to Ser Gendry," said Lady Sansa, flattening a ripple of velvet covering the bundle in Brienne's arms. In their shroud, the twin swords weighed no more than a babe.  My suckling babe , Brienne thought, remembering the flash of Asha Greyjoy's teeth as she pulled her dirk from between her breasts and pinned a screaming man's hand to a table.

She hesitated, her stomach turning at the memory -- a savage woman, and fit for the north. Lady Sansa noticed her pause and blinked expectantly. Flushing, Brienne nodded and backed towards the door.

"Yes, my lady," said Brienne, and bowed to both her and Lord Bran, who sat in his chair leafing through a letter without really seeing it. "I shall be back on guard for dinner."

Had I married Ser Hyle, I would be home with my father, mayhaps with babe of my own , thought Brienne as she left Lord Bran's solar and made her way to the yard. A babe would weigh the same in her arms, and far less in her heart. If she were at home in Tarth with her father, dusk would still be hours away; the afternoon sun would be glimmering over the blue lakes with only a dusting of snow over the meadows and the trees.

As her vows demanded, Brienne followed Lady Sansa to Winterfell, and so she'd chosen austere walls of granite over Evenfall, barren wastes of snow, bitter wind that bit through her furs, wolves howling every night beyond her shutters, the darkness, corpses dug out of the snow. The ones savaged by wolves were more gruesome to look upon, but the ones savaged by men chilled the marrow of her bones.  Even you, Ser Goodwin, would not have the stomach for this .

In the silence of coming dusk, she could hear the clang of a hammer across the yard. The sound of steel on steel took her back to the crossroads inn, what seemed a hundred years ago. How long had it truly been? Five years, ten? How many name days had she missed, swept up in winter's unrelenting march? 

However many years ago it was, it had still been autumn when she'd brought some food to Gendry, in a smithy behind an old oxcart; she had trudged through rain, her boots squelching in mud as deep as her ankle. Now the air was clear, and the ground too frozen for mud, but she still felt the echoes of the day with her. The scar of her ruined cheek ached.

The door of the smithy was ajar, and inside Gendry was hammering a piece of steel, deaf to her knock. She stepped inside, hoping to thaw her frozen nose by the heat of the open fire, roaring within the granite maw of the armory. Rivets of sweat ran down Gendry's face from his tangled mop of hair as he beat a piece of steel, hammer in his left hand. The motion was unpracticed, but not as awkward and fumbling as Brienne expected. Beneath Gendry's frayed, soot-stained tunic the twisted red echo of a wolf's claws trailed across his chest and ended under a tight linen bandage, rendering his right arm only mobile enough to hold the steel in place. When he set down his hammer, he did not seem surprised to see her. His eyes brimmed with suspicion. 

"Pardons, m'lady," he said, without sounding very sorry at all. Renly's ghost still lingered in Gendry's face, enough to wound her, but time had wrung out most of the resemblance; where Renly's fine and proud features ought to have been, hard and weathered ones stood in their place. 

"That's a fine sword," she said, looking at the blade on his workbench. He bowed his neck stiffly in thanks. 

"Will you be needing something, m'lady?" he said.

"Lord Bran and Lady Sansa have asked of you. There are two swords here," she said as she placed the bundle carefully on his work table, in the space free of carving knives and metal shavings.

"I'm to reforge them?" he asked. Scowling, Gendry tore apart the satin ties Lady Sansa arranged as if they had done him wrong, and unrolled the bundle.

"Valyrian steel," he said, as trace of awe in his voice. "This is your sword, m'lady," he said. "But this other one," he said, hesitantly taking the pommel in his rough hand, where rubies welled like drops of blood.

"Widow's Wail. King Joffrey's and then King Tommen's. Tywin Lannister split House Stark's ancestral sword in two to make these."

"This is my master's work," said Gendry quietly, his eyes dark as the blade in his hand. He lifted it, turned it in his hands, testing its weight and sharpness. "Lannisters," he scoffed, running a thumb over the ornate head of a lion.

"Can you do it?" she asked.

"I've seen it done once, and remember the lore, m'lady."

"There's no… there's no need to call me m'lady. I'm as far from a lady as a woman could be."

For a split second, Brienne imagined the anger vanish from Gendry's eyes. She blinked. Yes, the anger was gone, and left was an expression she could not place.

"I s'ppose it's for the best the Lady didn't hang you," he said.

"I wouldn't have been able to keep my oath to her had she hanged me," said Brienne. It was the only kindness she was like to get from Gendry. "Not that I have. I never found Lady Arya like I swore, and now I have to hand in my sword."

She tried so hard to not lose hope, to not let bitterness seep in, but today she had given up Oathkeeper.

"Half an oath might be enough," he said, turning his face to glower at the fire in the forge.  Renly , she thought with her heart twisting.  Would that I could have saved you.

"You have King Renly's eyes," she said softly, after some time. "The color is the same. But Renly always smiled."

The muscle in Gendry's jaw clenched.

"They say he was handsome."

"Handsome, yes," she said, willing her voice not to break. He'd held her so gently in his arms the night they danced at Evenfall and smiled so brilliantly. "And kind. He came to Evenfall and he danced with me when no one else would. He made me laugh. I was never happier than I was that night, dancing with Lord Renly, and I never felt prettier. If he thought I was big and ugly he never gave word. He was so kind. So kind and I…" 

You have a maid's heart , Ser Goodwin had said, and she did. His kindness and his likeness colored every other which followed and she was cursed to carry this grief within her like a secret. Not today. She'd given up Oathkeeper. "I swore my life to protect him but all my vows amounted to naught. He died in my arms. What could I do against Lord Stannis' sorcery?" she said softy, tired of the siege of memory. 

"They say you killed him," said Gendry.

"I didn't murder him, but I may as well have. I should have saved him. I  loved him."

"I know," he said. "When all you're thrown is the back end of a mule's arse your whole life it's the kind ones that hurt the most."

Suddenly, she made sense of the expression on Gendry's face.  Renly's eyes, my grief.

"Who was she?" Brienne asked.

"Who?"

"The girl you loved."

Gendry scowled as if he was about to argue, but then he shook his head.

"She's dead. Doesn't matter who she was." It looked as if nothing had pained him more to say.

"I'm sorry," Brienne said hastily, but Gendry did not respond, not even when Brienne stood and left, letting a blistering draft of air behind her. The sun had dropped beneath the trees, and any warmth had vanished with it. A lump lodged in Brienne's throat. She reached for her swordbelt, half-expecting to find Oathkeeper's familiar pommel beneath her fingers, but the scabbard was empty; as empty as her vows. Brienne's tears turned to ice on her cheeks on the walk to the oaken doors of the Great Hall. 

She had never seen a winter so cruel. They were years in, living off sparse grain rations, the dwindling gifts of White Harbor and other houses, and whatever vegetables the glass gardens produced. Crofters and other smallfolk would bring roots and nuts to Wintertown, along with game and fish from the White Knife, but in the great hall of Winterfell, the fires burned hot as a Dornish summer. 

Along the packed trestle tables, men and women alike laughed and clanked their cups together, enjoying the evening respite from the cold, and hard, thankless work. For Brienne rest had to wait until her guard ended, as it always had, as it always would. Her heels were sore and the small of her back ached from standing since the early hours and her nerves were rapidly fraying. 

The wind screeched against stone, and below and all around her people were making almost enough racket to drown it out. By the end of the soup Brienne's nerves were well shot, her skin crawling like it was on fire. 

Jaime had no heed of duty today and was well into his cups, waving his golden hand in Asha Greyjoy's face. He tittered something about a golden price. The woman laughed and splashed a bit of wine in his face, crimson droplets like blood upon his golden beard.

"It's horrible, Jaime, really," Brienne had said of his beard before the White Knife had frozen over.

"Wish you could grow one?" he laughed at her. "It won't make you prettier. Though it would keep you warm. It's a mighty fine thing to have your own pelt upon your face this far north."

He had taken a piece of her hair and placed it above her lip. His touch had been gentle; his words had been cruel.

"There, now you're a proper knight."

Brienne shook her head, dispelling the memory. Lady Sansa said the men would return when they had finished their scouting.  A few days , Brienne had thought,  a week mayhaps . She had not expected the fortnight to drag on. Northmen knew the trails of the Wolfswood and the length of daylight in winter. There had been no reason to worry before, but the savaged crofter had turned her concern to terror; she had seen what a direwolf could do.

The trestle tables were packed with everyone from maidservants to squires to second sons of Umber and Karstark, but even Brienne, who didn't know these faces half as well as a Northman, could tell there were gaping spaces where their best scouting men and hunters ought to have been. Lady Sansa primly ate her morsels, while Lord Bran only tasted the first portion of roast mutton, and every dish after he sent down without even touching. Brienne herself had received a fine bowl of red potatoes and turnips, garnished in rosemary. With every bite, she swallowed her grief. Even taciturn and pale, Lord Bran had kindness enough for her; she was a knight, and could muster up the same courage. 

"Who's the strongest man here?" called Asha across the hall, standing proudly with a leather-booted foot upon the bench, "Any man who can put my arm on the table gets a night with me!"

"I am," shouted old Hallis Mollen, with his grizzled face and missing ear.

"That old man, my lady? You could do with a fine knight like me," Ser Kyle Conden, in his white and red doublet, sprang up in response.

"Fine knight my arse," Jacks laughed.

Fools , Brienne lamented. The closest a man could hope to get to Lady Asha Greyjoy was with her thighs around his head and her axe buried in his skull.  A savage woman , thought Brienne,  but would that I were half as fierce .

"If you want the finest knight in the Seven Kingdoms, stop shouting, I'm right here," yelled Jaime, leaning dangerously into his stew, his wine sloshing in its cup.

"You're too drunk, Kingslayer."

Jaime , thought Brienne,  his name is Jaime . She swore her head would split.

"You haven't been the finest knight since you earned a golden hand."

"I'd still take him."

"No one asked you, Beth."

"No one asked you either," she said, smacking some Karstark man on the arm. He fell onto the man next to him. Challenged to a battle of arms, he had his fist slammed to the table after a moment's struggle.

"Wrestle me, Greyjoy!" Jaime slurred, his goblet weaving in his hand.

"A cripple? You insult me, Kingslayer."

"A cripple? I could best you with a sword in less than sneeze. Do you think a pirate could beat me, even as I am now?"

But Jaime would not see that he was no longer the man he'd been when knighted. His scraggly golden beard was streaked with silver hairs, and the lines about his eyes and mouth showed when he frowned or smiled. Though when he did the latter, he still looked a handsome man. The North had taken a toll on them both in age and looks, though Brienne had only had youth, never beauty. 

Below, at the long tables Lady Asha pinned Jaime's arm to the table, red faced with drink and grinning. It was a feral smile, Brienne decided, all the gentleness of youth drained out of her.  She is not so much older than I, is she? And not much more a lady . Only when she looked at Jaime did she feel like a girl, painfully young against all his years. Not that he thought he was getting any older.

"She's going to hurt him," said Lady Sansa.

"Let her," replied Lord Bran, sipping at his wine absently, eyes glazed. "They aren't children, nor is this a Southron court. He has less to damage anyhow."

"Bran, that's terrible."

The young lord only shrugged. "No more terrible than throwing a child out of a tower," he replied dispassionately, a chalky pallor to his face. Lady Sansa was silent.

Below, Jaime laughed and begged a rematch. Lady Asha beat him less soundly this time, her whole weight into her left arm. Jaime went sprawling against the table. A candle toppled over and extinguished in a bowl of soup, but a second fell after, and caught Jaime's beard where his face was pressed against the wood and ignited. 

He cried out in surprise, then in pain. Around him some continued japing and singing, hooting at Jaime's plight, while others gave shouts of alarm as the flames grew quickly and leapt out of his bead like fire on thatch. Drunkenly, he flailed at his face.

For a moment Brienne froze, unable to more from behind her table to the one below. Lady Sansa, however, did not hesitate. She stood and ran to him, rousing Brienne from her stupor. Lady Sansa doused the flames in his burning beard with the long sleeves of her dress, only taking a second to put them out.

"Jaime," called Brienne, reaching his side, "Jaime, are you hurt?"

He patted her arm, much sobered. 

"I won't be as ugly as the Hound, thanks to my lady," he tried to grin, although it came out a grimace. His cheeks and jaw were red in patches where the golden hair had burnt away. The terrible smell hung in the air. Any traces of mirth died, and he said wryly, "I'll have to shave it all. My face will be miserably cold now."

Everyone around them laughed except Lady Sansa, the sleeves ruined and her face white.

"My lady, are you alright?"

"Fine," she said tightly, "I'm fine. My dress is ruined."

"I buggered myself up prettily this time, eh, Brienne?" said Jaime, swaying in his seat. Old Hallis Mollen took him under the armpits and hauled him off the bench. 

"You rightly did," said Brienne. "If you were any drunker the wine in your sweat would have ignited."

"Will you scold me for drinking?" Jaime said sullenly. "I won't be taking your guard, the Maester will stick salves all over my face…"

"Scold yourself, and mourn your beard."

"The Lady Sansa…is she unhurt?"

"She's unhurt. Only her dress was burnt."

"Will you come with me, wench?" he asked, Hallis Mollen passing him to a Karstark man she might have recognized before, but whose name she didn't know. 

"You know my guard isn't ended, thanks to you," she said, helping right Jaime as he staggered forward and nearly planted his burned face into the table. "Get him out of here, and quickly," she murmured to the Karstark man. 

"Your sword," said Jaime suddenly, jerking upright and trying to wrestle out of the grip which held him. "Oathkeeper."

The Karstark man nodded to her, and with Ser Kyle Conden, dragged a leaning, swaying, and drunk Jaime Lannister out of the hall. She could hear his bitter laughter ringing in her ears. 

He had only left when the bells began to clang in the yard, and all the forced laughter and jostling in the hall guttered out.

"The men are back," gasped Lady Sansa.

From behind the high table, Lord Bran stirred and his command for all men to clear the hall was met with no hesitation. "How many do you think are dead this time?" asked Lord Bran as Hodor wheeled him next to his sister.

"Too many," replied Lady Sansa.

"Then let us hope it was worthwhile," he said.

"Would you not rather stay inside, where it's warm? You look rather awful," Sansa said, worry coloring her voice.

"I'll sleep later," he said, and offered no argument.

Brienne strode ahead of Lady Sansa and Lord Bran. The wheels of Bran's chair squeaked faintly and rumbled along the granite stone floor but kept pace well enough. In the entryway, before the heavy oaken doors to the yard opened, Brienne could hear the shouts of men and the snarling of a beast. In the dark, Brienne could hardly see a thing, but in a moment the torches had been lit to the fullest and the yard was awash with golden light.

A great black direwolf was snapping and snarling, thrashing his head against the ropes lashing his snout closed, kicking against his hog-tied legs. Where the ropes held, there was matted fur and bleeding skin.

Lady Sansa gasped, but Lord Bran was grim.

"Shaggydog," he said.

"What happened to him?"

"Looks like our men caught him."

"No, why's he so..."

"Wild? They're wolves, Sansa. Summer only seems docile, but in the woods he dines on elk and deer and human flesh."

"Gods," she gasped.

"Come on, hustle through, hustle through," yelled Alastar Glover on his big boned garron. The rest of the party trotted through the gates, some leading their limping horses and others grappling to keep their skittering mounts under rein, one of which was pulling a wayn.

"Keep away from the wolf!" called Ser Alyn Ryswell to the scattered people in the yard. "Someone fetch chain and fetters!"

"Not chains. The godswood," commanded Lord Bran.

"I beg your pardon, my lord," said Glover, coming up on his horse, who was tossing his head and trying to skirt backwards. "This wolf has eaten his share of men. We caught him dining on a frozen corpse when we came up on him, chomping right through the spine as if it were nothing."

Lady Sansa gasped again, and Brienne herself felt ill. Those wolves had haunted her from the Riverlands and would not let her be.

"How many dead?"

"Two of our Northmen, and one's got only half his leg about him. The beast ought to be chained, my lord."

"Take the man to Maester Samwell, and hurry," Bran commanded against the night chill. "This is my brother's wolf, Alastar. He will be kept in the godswood until I say otherwise."

Alastar Glover bowed his head. "As you say, my lord. My lady," he deferred to Lady Sansa. "We caught men stealing roots right out the back of a crofter's sledge. Wildlings. What should we do with them?"

"Wildlings?" Sansa said. "This far south?"

"There must be trouble up north. I will hear them," Bran said. "Bring them forward."

On Lord Bran's command, Ser Alyn and Alastar Glover brought the three men forward, one limping, all swaddled fat as southron babes in furs and skins. Ser Alyn pulled their hoods from their heads. The limping man was not young, with a plain and windburnt face in a massive brown beard streaked with gray beneath the hoarfroast. The other snarled and spat against his ropes and when Ser Alyn tried to tear the horse skull mask from his face, he received a bitten hand for his trouble. The third was not a man at all, but a woman with a wan and hard face, red and windburned.

"Alastar Glover says you've been stealing."

"The lad needed his strength, my lord," growled the eldest, kneeling freely in the snow.

"We've traveled a long way. From Skagos, my lord Stark," said the woman.

"Cannibals!" shouted Ser Alyn. "He tried to eat my hand off!"

Ser Alyn was wrong. Everything from his Flea Bottom accent to his address marked the man a Southron, and near as far from a cannibal wildling as a person could be.

"I have taken this lad through wrack and storm to bring him back. Him and his bloody man-eating wolf," shouted the man through his frozen beard. Lord Bran met eyes with the wildling woman, and then he seemed to understand.

"Stand down, Lady Mormont," commanded Lord Bran to the she-bear with her raised sword.

"Mayhaps we better keep our swords up," said Lady Mormont, but she lowered her arm.

"I am Davos Seaworth, Lord of the Rainwood and the Hand of the Rightful King of Westeros, Stannis Baratheon. I have brought your liege lord home, as was commanded to me."

"Let him go, Ser Alyn," said Lord Bran. Ser Alyn and Alastar and the She-Bear all stuttered, hesitant, but the Lady Mormont finally strode forward and cut their ropes. Lord Davos thanked her. The woman helped him stagger to his feet and held him there.

"You bite my hand, I'll spank your arse bloody, you hear me?" spat the She-Bear and cut the other man's ties as well. The man pulled his mask off his face and Brienne started. It was only a boy, beardless and thin, with a rope of auburn hair and blue eyes above the high-cheekboned set of his face.

"Rickon?" whispered Lady Sansa. "Bran, is it baby Rickon?" She ran forward, her skirts dragging in the snow. "Rickon? Rickon?"

"You're home," said Bran. All was still, no noise but the snarls of the black beast in his ropes and the crackle of the torches. The boy stepped towards Lord Bran and Lady Sansa with hesitation, looking once to Lord Davos and the woman, who gave the boy a nod of encouragement, and then a stiff bow.

"Mother?" said the boy. His lips cracked and bled when he spoke, his voice hoarse and thick with the accent of the Old Tongue. He sounded like the wildlings she'd met settled in the Gift. He looked like one too. The snow fell hard and Brienne blinked it out of her eyes. Flakes had melted on her lady's cheeks and in her hair, but when Brienne looked again, her lady's eyes were full of tears. 

It was enough to shock Brienne. She had never seen her lady weep; not when men fell like flies before her, swords running them from back to front, arrows decorating them like grotesquely plumed birds, not when she buried Harry Hardyng at the foot of the Gates of the Moon, not when she faced the shade of her Lady Mother, not when Gendry's sword fell as straight and true as his hammer and took Lord Petyr's head in her name.

"No, Rickon. Mother's gone. It's Sansa. Your sister, Sansa." Her face was red with the wind and the cold, and her tears were freezing in the air where they dropped off her cheek and onto her cloak.

"You're Sansa?" he said, turning his face to Bran, "I don't..."

"Rickon," Bran said, "You remember me."

"Brother. You came to me in dreams. You kept calling to come home. When we were lost, you showed us the way."

"And now you've come home," said Bran. "Lord Davos?" called Bran. "You brought him all the way from Skagos?"

"I did, my lord."

"How? And on whose orders?"

"Lord Manderly, my lord. He provided the order and showed us the way."

"Bran, we have to bring them in," urged Lady Sansa. "They've gone a long way and the night is so cold. Lord Davos, you are hurt. We will tend to you."

Lord Davos, despite being ushered along, did not move from the snow.

"My king," he said with a rasp. "I heard my king is dead." 

The words fell like an axe upon Brienne's heart, jarring her more than the cold wind ever had. Stannis. It was Stannis she would have killed, and Lady Catelyn who had sworn not to hold her back. 

"Your king lives," Brienne called. "On the Wall. He lives."

Lord Davos sagged, eyes closing in relief, in prayer. They did not open again. He lay in the snow, old, tired, and noble.

"Get him a bed in the upper wing," Lord Bran said quietly, but the men around him moved at once. They pulled Lord Davos into their arms and all four men carried him into the Keep. 

"When everyone is clear, bring the wolf into the godswood."

"I will do it," said Rickon. "Shaggy will hurt himself trying to get out of those ropes." 

The boy was unafraid. Why should he be? The wolf was his, and if Lady Sansa had told her true, the wolf was a part of him. Man and wolf married for life.

"But the wolf is savage," Brienne heard Lady Sansa whisper, her voice thick with worry and horror.

"They aren't dogs or pets, they're beasts who crush spines and rip men apart," Lord Bran said. "And that beast is part of Rickon, as much as Summer is part of me."

"Warging and sorcery," Sansa breathed. 

"We are all Wargs."

"Not me," she said adamantly. "It's savage, this magic."

"This is the north, sister. Winter is coming."

"But…warging? Not Robb, not me."

"No," said Lord Bran. "Not you. You lost your wolf."

The way he said it chilled Brienne to the bone. 

"We should come inside, my lady," Brienne said. The wind was picking up again. Hodor pushed Bran's chair through the snow, grunting with effort as it stuck to the wheels, jerked, stopped, and rolled again. Lady Sansa did not follow. 

"My lady," Brienne began.

"He was a baby when I left for King's Landing with my father and Arya," she said, swallowing thickly and lifting her chin. "A baby," she whispered.

"We must come into the castle, my lady," Brienne said. She was growing colder by the minute. If the wolf attacked, what would she be able to do with a pair of frozen feet and hands? When Brienne turned Lady Sansa away from the yard and up the stairs into the First Keep, the boy and his wolf were alone. The gates were shut; dozens of eyes watched from parapets and open windows - those who had been in the yard had preceded them into the Keep or scattered to the kitchens and the stables. There was a light in the armory, but no one found shelter there. No one but the blacksmith boy with Renly's eyes. 

Rickon slashed the ropes on the black wolf's legs with the knife from his boot. The wolf, scrambling, shook his fur like a dog, and as calm as a dog put his head in Rickon's hand. The boy cut the rope around his muzzle. He smoothed the matted blood and hair. He checked every wound and welt, probed the thick fur and muscles and bones beneath. When Rickon found no injuries, he turned and followed the way Lord Bran had gone, through the oak doors and into the heart of the Keep, the wolf behind him. Brienne could not imagine this was the same monster who had nearly severed a man's neck with one bite.

"This way," said Lady Sansa, trotting off into the Keep. Brienne could only follow, the stairs going up and down and the halls twisting this way and that. When she was sure they'd probably made it to the crypts, Brienne saw white trunks in the moonlight, the branches as barren as the hanged men on the Kingsroad, skeletons cleaned away by wolves and carrion crows. 

"Sansa," said Lord Bran softly when they came down the last set of stairs and met the sharp night air once more. "Best we all find a good fireplace, hm?"

"Yes, we should," she said, placing her stole upon her brother's shoulders. "Where's Rickon?" she asked.

Bran gestured to the open gate of the Godswood, where a figure was stalking, growing larger and larger until he became the boy Rickon. A snarl echoed off the tree trunks, and then a yip. The boy's wolf threw up his head and howled, joined by Lord Bran's wolf in a note that was both joyous and plaintive. 

"He won't be happy long," said Rickon. 

"Neither will be. We will let them out soon," said Lord Bran.

"Bran, you need to come inside. You're looking worse by the minute," Lady Sansa said, her voice hushed and worried. "Bran?"

Lord Bran slumped in his chair, shivering violently, his eyes white and sightless. The howls died off.

"What's happening to him?" asked the boy. 

"I don't know," said Lady Sansa, grasping Lord Bran's head in her arms. "Hodor, take him into the keep, quickly. Brienne, close the gate. Your guard is done for the night, I won't ask any more of you."

She spurred to action and heaved the gate shut. When it was done, she slumped against the wood, breathing in heady lungfuls of blistering air. Her hand went to her hip, searching again for Oathkeeper's grip. In the sheath was only a plain blade. Brienne felt like weeping again, but she would have to wait until she found warmth, lest her lashes freeze and glue her eyes shut. 

As she turned to the keep, a howl from beyond the walls of the Godswood, beyond even the walls of Winterfell, froze her. It was a desolate sound that pulled on her, like a kindred spirit was waiting outside the gates to tell her she wasn't the only one who bore this grief . I have seen your daughter home, your son, and now your youngest son, my lady . The boys had come back from the grave, but Arya Stark had not. Brienne would find her and the debt would be paid; the vow fulfilled.

 


	6. Arya III

Night fell away into gray morning as she scrubbed blood from under her fingernails in the brackish canal water. _I was a fisherman's daughter from White Harbor,_ she reminded herself, straining against a tide of memory threatening to break through her teachings. Her hands were white and mottled and shaking, the veins starkly blue. She clenched them in her cloak. _Arya has the hands of a blacksmith,_ Septa Mordane had said, almost ten years ago. _Those soft little things?_ someone else had told her. He'd been wrong. Her hands were hard and cold and stained with blood.

 _My name is Cat,_ she thought, over the memory of granite walls and warm furs. _I trained as a water dancer. The work was hard and torturous but I learned better than anyone how to be quick as a snake, fierce as a wolverine, calm as still water. I have a place here._ But that was a lie too grand for her to believe. Mummer's tricks and skill with a sword could be taught to anyone with a mind to learn, along with an eye for where a man was blind, where he was weak, where he could be killed. The unteachable skill was belonging anywhere. On the other edge of the same coin lay a bitter truth; one had to first belong nowhere.

 _My brother,_ thought Arya, _I belong with my brother._ The ripples stilled and in the green glass surface, above her long face, the moon was a sliver in a paling sky no thicker than an eggshell. _I sold clams and cockles when I was a little girl washed up from the sea,_ she recited. _When I was old enough, I trained as a water dancer to protect the Sealord, no matter the toil, no matter the hurt._ She stared at her face in the pea-green water, a world away from the hot springs in the godswood of Arya's home. Cat stood, all her bones creaking and popping in the cold. On her elbow a bruise throbbed, and another on her shin knifed pain up her knee.

The book at her feet reminded her of her duty. _Valar dohaeris,_ she thought and lifted the tome from the ground.Once the pages might have been edged in scarlet, but now the ink was brown and flaking like dried blood. _I have to bring this back,_ she thought numbly. Of all the thoughts racing through her head — her memories of Jon Snow's smile, Edric Storm leaving her, how the Spider died gasping, Raff the Sweetling and the pimply squire at the inn and her mother's body in the river — finishing her task was the clearest. _I have to serve._

She tucked the book safely under her bloodstained cloak and willed one aching leg to move, then the other. Her feet took her south towards the House of Black and White. In the space between two stone houses, leaning so close onto each other their roofs might have touched, a crack of sunlight peeked through the mist. She closed her eyes and let pink light caress her face with warmth. It was bright as dawn over a fresh fall of summer snow, and the first Braavos had seen in months.

How long ago it had been since she'd shared a bed with Sansa in Winterfell, and woke to watch the sun rise over the snow-capped pines of the Wolfswood together. In that moment she wished to see spring with all her heart, despite the shrinking days and the terrible fear that these rays would be her last. Her arms strained against the weight of the Spider's book, and her dream vanished. If she could not dream of spring, she could wish to hear a wolf howling, but there were no wolves in Braavos prowling the crooked streets, teeth bared, claws ready for tearing. There was only her. Dreams were for children, and girls who loved lemon cakes; she had a hole where her heart was once.

Her limbs took her under the towering arch of the sweetwater river, and beneath it she stopped. The kindly man wanted this book for himself, but some instinct, a nagging in the back of her mind, told her to keep it from him a moment longer. _He may not need me anymore after this,_ she thought _._ The kindly man would call her Arya of House Stark for cheating him his book. He might blind her again, or take her ears, or her mouth, but he could not kill her as long as he didn't know where it was. _Fear cuts deeper than swords_ , her thoughts raced. _Swift as a deer. Quiet as shadow. Quick as a snake. Calm as still water. Strong as a bear. Fierce as a wolverine. The man who fears losing has already lost. Fear cuts deeper than swords._

She looked left and right, and seeing no one in the mist, loosed a stone near the street. Her heart pounding, she shoved the book into the hole until her elbow disappeared into the space. Her fingers found some of Brea's forgotten trinkets in her favored hidey-hole: the ebony comb she had stolen from Talea, a silk cloak, a locket with a ribbon of their mother's dark hair knotted inside. She pushed them in front of the book and replaced the stone. _Valar dohaeris,_ she thought, and let the empty space within her drown out her thoughts. _All men must serve._

 

The kitchen smelled of baking fish and a faint, brackish canal smell that shouldn't have been there. A heartbeat later it vanished, a figment of her imagination.

"You are troubled," said the kindly man. She smoothed her black and white robe as she sat across the pine table from him. Was she troubled? The truth would not do, but a truth would do.

"Yes," she said. A cup and a heel of bread waited for her, the same as every other night of her return. Within each cup of the new moon waited either only milk, or a lesson. The lessons came rarely, but were strong enough teachers for her to grow wary of drinking. Instead, she took the dark rye in her hand and chewed slowly. Bread was always honest.

"Why?"

"Because a man died poorly," she admitted, clenching her hands in her robe. The soft spun wool made her feel safer. "A man died knowing who this face was born to."

"You have spent many years now in service, you should be past troubles like these."

"I was troubled only for this face, and who else may know it. It wasn't a matter of love or hate. The job was done."

"Perhaps you need more teaching from Izembaro." His voice was even, but she knew the words behind the mask of his face. She would not be another girl like poor silly Mercy, with her little songs. To think if she didn't have a real blade under her mummer's cloak Raff might have killed her, or worse. Her lie had been thin, but it had passed. _You will not send me back._

"No," she said.

"And the book?"

"Hidden, in some place only he knew. But I know too."

"You must bring it," said the man. "It was to be done today."

"There wasn't time. The moon turned black and I must serve. In three days time the tides won't be so high and I'll be able to reach the spot better — and not destroy something so important."

The kindly man steepled his fingers, sighing. "And what of your other secrets?"

"Illyrio Mopatis, the Magister of Pentos, was in the city last night."

"Pentos?" he asked. "What business does Pentos have here?"

"He is to make Edric Storm lord of Storm's End."

"Ah, your boy."

"He's not," she said to hide the knot in her stomach. He would be on a ship now, sailing for Westeros. Or perhaps he was going to Pentos, to the fat magister's manse to learn politics and graces and skill with a blade. Edric would have a good time of sword fighting, but would still be afraid.

"You have fondness. You face lies well, but I can see it in your honest, betraying eyes."

"Fondness is for children," she threw at him. It was silly to consider Edric a friend. All her friends left her; she was old enough to know that. "If he is to be a lord in Westeros, it is good to know something of him."

"You are not the only spy with your eyes set on the boy, and certainly not the best, to spend so many hours watching one face." He meant to humble her, but he was lying. _He isn't important enough for other spies._ "What do you see there?"

"A bastard boy," Arya confessed, her gaze as bold as she could muster. She expected a rebuke, but the kindly man's eyes softened.

"Good," he said. "And you can do better."

"Better?"

"You still have loves and hates. They are dying, I see that in you, but they are not gone. You must kill them. Apply yourself to your study once again without distraction. On the morrow you will have a test."

"A test?" she asked, killing the urge to chew her lip. "What sort of test?"

"A test of the strength of your teaching," said the kindly man. He leaned forward and stared at her. "Who is your master, Arya of House Stark? Him of Many Faces? Or do you, in your proud heart, still serve no one but yourself?"

_Men take many paths through this vale of tears and pain. Ours is the hardest. Few are made to walk it. It takes uncommon strength of body and spirit, and a heart both hard and strong._

"I'll be ready for your test," she said. If she failed he could not kill her, not without his book. If she failed, she would have nowhere to go. Nowhere but north.

"You remember my teaching. Good. Now drink, Arya of House Stark. You must be tired."

"I'm not thirsty tonight," she said.

"You will be on the morrow." When she balked, he tilted his head ever so slightly, as if observing some curiosity. "You are afraid."

"No." She willed her thumping heart to not betray her. _Before you drink from the cold cup, you must offer up all you are to Him of Many Faces_ , the kindly man had told her a thousand years ago, or mayhaps only yesterday. Was this the cup he meant?

"A lie. Drink," he said. "It will not take your eyes, nor your ears, nor your mouth."

"Not this time?" She eyed the cup in her hand. It was cold against the palm.

"Not this time," said the kindly man.

For a moment, as she brought it to her mouth, she caught a scent of the imagined canal smell. Her heart skipped. _Valar dohaeris._ She drank.

"Who are you?" he asked. Inside her, the milk felt like ice turning in her stomach.

"A servant of the Many-Faced God." She blinked her eyes heavily and the kitchen swam in front of her. The flesh of the kindly man's face melted away to reveal a rotting skull, a worm wriggling from his eye, the empty sockets black as the Pool far above her head where the dead would drink and find mercy. _Who are you,_ his voice echoed in her head. _A killer,_ she thought, pressing her hand to her belly.

She blinked again, and his face returned. _I am a Water Dancer training to be a Sword of Braavos._ She closed her eyes and shook her head against the ache growing in her temple. _No, I'm a ghost, a spy. I serve the Many-Faced God._ The milk pricked her inside, sharp as a knife, cold as steel. What had he given her this time? _No, I am Arya. Arya of House Stark_.

" _Valar dohaeris_ ," said the kindly man, almost sadly.

She grimaced and from far away, as if in a dream, felt herself swaying on her stool and gripping the table. She lost the memory as soon as it came. Inside her welled a pinprick of laughter — a gasping, strangled sob.

" _Valar morghulis,_ " her voice not even a whisper. _Lya,_ she prayed in terror, _Mercy, Beth, Cat, Salty, Squab, Nan, Weasel, Arry, Lumpyhead._ She scrambled to stay upright while all around her very stone of the walls weaved and tilted. Her strength left her, her hands slipped, and the room upended.

The stone rose to meet her, but she never felt it.

 

Her dream was cold and gray. She stalked through the woods, trotting along a deer path with her nose to the ground and a few of her cousins behind her. Her belly coiled in hunger, but the scent of the tracks had faded over the last few turns of light and dark sky — she would find a sooner meal in mice. A mouthful of mice would fill her enough to cross the leagues between her and the rest of her pack, but she didn't want little wriggling creatures she could swallow in less than a heartbeat; she wanted to taste blood and tear limb from bone, to sink her teeth into a warm pale throat and feel it crush in her jaw. She wanted to hear men screaming.

Night was a better time for hunting, but she would not deny herself should she come upon a pack of men plodding, the way men did, through the snow, under the gray sky. Above, a blanket of clouds dark as soot smothered the sun and sky. Ears pricked for any sign of a heartbeat, a twitch of paw, she padded on, her footfalls silent in the snow.

A crosswind blew through the trees and she froze. _Man_. She turned to her brothers and sisters, worn and weary, yearning for the rest of their families. They were every inch as fierce as she, and would never leave her. Soon they too caught the scent and signaled their assent to the hunt.

The scent led them through a thicker part of the wood; trees felled by their ice-laden branches littered the underbrush, and overhead bare pines clattered with every gust of wind. She heard them before she saw them.With them came the musky smell of horse, and the tang of death.

Nymeria reached the crest of the hill and contented to watch through the thick pine brush. Their smell boiled her blood. She peeled her lips back and licked her teeth.

"Frey?" asked one of them, voice soft and clear in the still wood. She treaded slowly now, one paw at a time in the snow.

"Smallfolk," said the other. He'd make the best meal out of them — the red furred one was too gamey and had a bow and quiver slung on his back, while the other smelled too much like piss for her to prefer him. "Nothing but rags under 'is Frey cloak. Stole it, most like."

"Take the cloak, leave the body," growled the one in the yellow cloak.

"You want to invite wolves at the inn's door?" snapped the second voice.

"Don't take that tone with me, boy." There was a rustle, a clink and a heave. "I said leave 'im."

"If we listened to what you said all the time, we'd be likely dead, Lem."

"Not you too, you little freckled shite."

"I've still got me bow and I can still shoot you clean through the eye," said the first man. Then turning another way, "Covering him up with snow won't help none."

"It'll keep the scent off for awhile," said the boy.

"Better he be eaten quick."

"Seems a shame to leave him."

"Shame for him to die. 'Im and every other bugger who's died 'n this war. Close 'is eyes if you like, Gendry. We've made our patrol, and I want your Jeyne to cook me up a nice warm soup, some ale too."

"She's not mine, Lem," he replied testily.

"Right, on'y a princess be good enough for you," laughed the big man in his tattered cloak, more gray than yellow.

He mounted his horse and sent up a spray of snow as he set off at a trot. "An' you shall be my lady love," he sang hoarsely, laughing, "An' I shall be your lord," before his words were lost amongst the trees.

"Leave it, Gendry. I don't like these woods, better we leave quick."

"I wish the Lady would hang him," glowered the boy, mounting his own horse. "Long Jeyne s'not mine. Never was," he said.

"He only says it to rile us both. Works on you like a charm, not that 'e has to try hard to make you cross."

"Come on," said Gendry, and dug his heels into his horse's flanks, the red haired man on his tail. Nymeria, and her hunting pack followed, lean, hungry, and without mercy.

She and her sisters would gorge on fresh meat today. With her nose full of the scent of man and horse, she broke into a run. They burst through the trees onto the trail. Startled, the horses took off at a gallop, spraying snow and overturning the contents of the wayn.

The men shouted and their cries echoed off the bare trees. The black haired man drew his sword, but couldn't let go of his death grip on his horse's mane for more than a few seconds to wield it.

The second man strung his bow in seconds and shot, but his arrow hissed past her ear. A strangled yelp sounded behind her. Enraged, she sprang and sank her teeth in to his horse's neck. His mount went down screaming as blood stained her face, warm red droplets in the cold white snow, but as he tumbled into the snow, the man loosed an arrow, and it struck her shoulder.

The point of the arrow scraped against the bone, the pain a white hot knife. She snarled in pain and reeled, searching for her sisters. Beside her, two tore at the horse, while the others brought the man in the yellow cloak down into the snow. The boy would hurt them, the boy would kill them. She scrambled from her bed of blood.

Blood stained the snow in a trail behind her; it ran freely down her leg and steamed in the cold air as she limped and stumbled on. Beneath the skin, her shoulder pricked and burned. She fell into the snow, her eyes swimming red and white and the trees blurred into a hundred faint gray lines. _My pack._ Men shouted around her, their horses beating a staccato on the ground that grew louder and louder. _My brothers and sisters._ The struggle drained out of her, and the world grew dark and silent.

 

She woke gasping. For a moment she did not know where she was. The sky and stars were gone, shrouded in a gray fog above her. There were no fetters on her ankles, and no arrow buried in her shoulder. She was a girl, she realized, with two legs and two arms; she had no claws and no fur covered her. It must have been the reason she was so cold.

Above her, two pairs of feet pattered, and fell back into the night and into the fog, the sound of their blades only an echo in the dark. She blinked heavily, her eyes taking in the hazy halos of flame from the low-burning lamps upon the bridge. Beside her water lapped stone, tinkling gently like glass bells. She drew herself up on her elbows, but the motion made her stomach roil and she retched all over her damp tunic.

 _It's black_ , she thought with terror. She vomited all over again, this time onto the stone, slimy with green algae. Thirsty, and desperate to get the taste of the black liquid out of her mouth, she cupped her hands into the canal's brackish water and drank, knowing it was unfit for it. She drank it all, forcing it down as she gagged on the taste.

After a few moments her nausea faded, but the foul taste in her mouth lingered. The ripples settled and she saw staring back at her a long and solemn face, made pale yellow by the light of night. Her hand moved to her nose, her cheeks, her chin. _Hardly a pretty face,_ she decided, but it was hers. The wind blew through the soupy mist and she shuddered, a chill running down her spine.

Like a whisper in the fog, she heard a pole boat stalking slowly through the water upstream. _This is no time of night for honest men_. She unfolded her frozen limbs and on bare feet padded to the bridge.

She ran her hands over the stone, looking for cracks or dents, until she found a little ledge, invisible in the dark, an arm's length above her head. The boat slid closer, and she began to climb.

The first handhold wasn't so hard. She was light and strong and lifted herself up the stone with her arms as her hard blackened feet scrambled below her. She found another crack, and put her hand inside, and continued to climb. At the next handhold, she cut her foot on a rough jut of stone, and at the following one the nail of her thumb split in two. Her arms shook as she reached the top of the bridge, silent and empty with the bravos gone. She did not wait to face the man in the boat — she picked a direction and ran.

Where she was going or where she had come from, she did not know and did not stop to ponder it. Overhead, stone houses four stories tall and taller loomed, leaning atop one another, their shutters barred to the night, and to her. The shadows were familiar, more welcoming than any brazier in a nobleman's house, and guided her when her foggy mind could not keep up with the twists and turns, or when an alleyway guttered out into crumbling, crooked buildings half sunken into the lagoon. She was swift as a deer, fierce as a wolverine. _Fear cuts deeper than swords_.

Under the arch of the sweetwater river, a mass of stone high above her head, she crumpled to the ground. Her stomach cramped. She retched again, clutching at the gray stone and shivering. _Why am I here?_ If she went north, she'd reach the Moon Pool and the Iron Bank of Braavos, and past, the Sealord's Palace. _The Sealord,_ she thought. _Protect the Sealord. My name is…_

Again, she coughed and spit up whatever was left in her stomach, only a black dribble in the dark. _My name is…_ She uncurled, glancing around for the sound of footsteps. In the fog, they could be anywhere. _I don't know who I am._ She pulled her stolen cloak tighter. _I don't know who I am._ Her heart hammered in her throat. _My name is…_ But no matter how hard she tried to remember, the name would not come to her tongue. _What did he give me?_

Who _he_ was she couldn't recall either, but then she could. He was a man, with a yellow skull and a kindly old face. _No, that doesn't make sense._ He was a man in black and white acolyte robes — a servant of a great house. Was she a servant too? _I am,_ she realized, feeling the calluses of her hands.

"Why have I come here?" she whispered to herself. Her voice cracked, and was lost in the fog. In the west lay the Isle of Gods, and the moment she thought it, a great door of ebony and weirwood sprang up in her mind. Inside great red tallow candles smelled of snow and smoke and pine needles peppered the statues of more gods than she could name, and past the stone benches lay a pool of water as smooth and black as obsidian. _Those who come to drink from the black cup are looking for their angels,_ the man with the kindly face had told her many years ago.

The sound of footsteps came again.

"Boy!" called a man in Braavosi. His voice wavered and rasped in the dark.

"M'not a boy." She fumbled for the waist of her tunic, expecting to feel the hilt of a blade there, but it was missing. _My sword,_ she thought muddily, _my sword._

"Boy," said the voice again, closer, but this time in the Common Tongue.

"I've nothing to rob." She groped around her for anything she could use — a loose rock, a discarded piece of wood, a fishhook. All she came up with were muddy hands for her trouble. _._

"No, no," he said, emerging from out of the fog. He was hunch-backed and twisted. Whether he was fat or thin, she could not tell; nor could she tell the shape of his face, the color of his eyes. The stink of rotting cabbage rolled off him — the smell of an ancient man. "I need help, boy."

"Help?" She stilled. _I can still kill him with my hands._ She would not go willingly into the nightlands. _I have come this far. I have lived this long. I've seen worse than this._ "Are you hurt?"

"Help me boy, and I can take you to shelter. I know a place where it's warm."

"What do you need?" She backed, one silent step at a time, out from under the arch. On the street she might be able to see his face — if she could see his face, she could see his lies. _He will see my face too._ She froze again, her shaking hand pressed to the cold stone of the aqueduct.

"To find a book. I am too old to search for it. My son, stupid boy, let his whore into my house and she stole a book of my family history. Thought she could sell it but found it was worthless at the market. She hid it behind a loose brick here."

Her memory jolted. _A book._

"You need me to find it for you? In the middle of the night?"

"Best time to do it, heh. No crowds, no questions."

She backed another step. "How am I supposed to find it?"

"Where do sneaky girls hide anything? You will know."

"You called me boy, but you knew I was a girl."

"I can hear it in your voice. A pretty girl, too, I can tell. Come on, help me. Here," he said, and tossed a coin. She skittered backwards to catch it in her palm — a golden dragon of Westeros.

She stepped into the foggy glow of the oil lamp, and a moment later so did the old man. His clothes were the plain dark vestments of a nobleman and under a mane of red hair streaked silver, he wore a pale, wrinkled face that lacked the honest leanness of a working man and instead sagged like dough gone flat. Even a twisted old man could hide a blade, and even a twisted old man could be more than he appeared. _In the fog all men are killers._

"Alright," she said. "Where do I start?"

"The loose bottom stones," he said. "Baseborns have all sorts of hiding-holes there."

She nodded, holding the coin tightly in her hand. She was thankful the old man did not follow her under the dark arch where she couldn't see him. _He may not kill me_ , she thought, but not once did she take him for an honest man. Not once did she think his story true. The search was easier than she expected; a place sprang up in her memory and a little while later, she discovered the loose stone. Behind it lay trinkets and discarded trash. She pocketed a wooden comb inlaid with gold, but the rest she brushed aside and reaching, found a brick wrapped in silk. _Not stone — parchment._

Her feet stepped without her wishing to, left right left, back to the canal. Some hard teacher pulled her forward while her whole heart fluttered like a caged bird against her ribs.

"A girl has done well," said the old man when she reached him. He took the heavy tome from her outstretched hand and offered her another golden dragon. Before she grasped it he tutted and pulled it away. "One more thing," he said, smiling through this crooked teeth. He pulled his cloak back to reveal a blade at his hip — shorter than a bravo's sword and longer than a dirk.

He wrapped his old, pale fingers around the pommel one by one as if plucking a harp and pulled it from his belt. She coiled as if to run, but he lifted his palm in truce, coin still between his fingers. For a heartbeat she stilled, and waited for his words.

"Throw this blade into the canal," he said, and offered her the blade. Her stomach tightened. She did not need to see the mark on the blade or the carving on the hand guard to know, as soon as she felt its grip beneath her palm, this was her sword. _Needle._

"Go on," urged the old man. "The canal."

Her legs took her to the bridge, but her heart had stopped. All she had to do was uncurl her fist, and the sword would be gone. But how could she, when it was all she had of herself? _The cost is all of you,_ the kindly man said once, and standing over the canal, the mists curling over the green water, she knew the price. She felt stricken, robbed.

"And if I don't?" she said. _My brother._ She remembered his sad smile the day he'd left, and the hole in her heart felt empty and fierce.

"Why not? It's not your sword, is it?"

She gripped it tighter.

"A girl has a memory," he sighed sadly. "Then a girl fails. It seems the price was too high for you." _The Many-Faced God will take your ears, your nose, your tongue,_ she remembered the kindly man saying. _He will take your sad gray eyes that have seen so much. He will take your hands, your feet, your arms and legs, your private parts. He will take your hopes and dreams, your loves and hates._ "And when a girl's memories return, she will know too much to leave," his voice whispered beside her, close to her ear.

 _Stick 'em with the pointy end._ Before he ever drew his blade, she turned and sank Needle into his belly. The book fell from his arms and his mouth sprang open, gasping, rheumy eyes wide as saucers. She yanked her sword from the old man's body, the spray of blood on her face like warm rain.

He fell to the ground and his features flickered like a candle. For a moment his eyes were as green as the lagoon before returning to pale, filmy brown. _Blood magic,_ she thought, struck with horror.

"Who are you?" She backed from his staggering body, eyes wide. _I too have worn faces like a new gown._ She remembered the sting of a knife running across her face and the tight feeling of new skin.

"A man who once owed you three names, but you would not remember now." His mouth twisted into something resembling a smile and his chest heaved. "That would be the point." He wheezed and blood dribbled from his lips.

"You knew me? Why can't I remember? Why do you have my sword?"

"You brought me to the nightlands, wolf girl," he gasped, grinning, and pressed two fingers to his temple. "The Red God has his due."

" _Valar morghulis_ ," she replied out of habit. _Only death may pay for life, s_ he remembered another man saying long ago — a sly-faced man with his hair half red, half white.

" _Valar dohaeris_ , wolf girl."

"Tell me my name," she demanded, not bothering to wipe away the furious tears in her eyes. He smiled with bloodied teeth, sighed one last breath, and died. As the cold settled over the old man, she remembered a room of gray stone and flickering red candles, a kitchen that smelled of baking fish. She remembered a cold cup, and the price she'd paid. With resolve, she gripped the pommel of her sword. _Stick 'em with the pointy end._ She would find her own way.


	7. Gendry

"Ser Gendry graces us with his presence," said Jacks with a sneer, jostling Nory in the ribs. Gendry shut the kitchen door behind him, shivering, red-faced and torn between longing for the warm kitchen hearth populated with the likes of Jacks and Nory, and longing for the solace of outside, black as pitch and a wind blowing so cold it burned. His growling stomach decided he would bear the company at hand.

"Some porridge for m'lord Smith? Or would 'e like some poached quail like a southron?" said Nory. He sneered with a mouth full of mashed up bread. Gendry had never eaten poached quail in his life.

Vera, broad as an ox and twice as strong with calluses hard as tree knots on her knuckles from kneading dough, gave Gendry a long, hard look before she plopped a ladle full of oatmeal into his wooden bowl. _Don't you start nothing in my kitchen,_ she'd said on half a dozen occasions. Gendry sat at the end of the table, beside the servant girls. Ylena ignored him but to point out he had oatmeal in his beard, but Masha handed him her half-eaten roll of sweetbread and smiled.

"Just cause he's got a fine room of his own in the armory don't make him no one you got to give your bread to, Mashenka," said Jeb.

"S'pose a girl'd be sweet on me if I were favored by the Lord Stark. No one sat by my beside while I was ailing."

"If you had a skill 'sides eating with your mouth open and not losing any food, you might get a room o' your own and a visit from our Lord Stark as well," Ylena glowered at Nory.

"Why you have to wound me? I'm guardsman, 'Lena, 'ent that enough for ya?"

"Good enough for a lowly maid, don't you mean? I suppose a girl like me ought to be thrilled a pig brain like you is takin' an interest."

Masha leaned into Gendry conspiratorially, murmuring, "you picked a good day to wake up early," with her cheek stuffed full of porridge. She glanced towards Ylena, whose ears were growing alarmingly red under her thick black crown of braided hair.

"He's an idiot," said Gendry in a low voice after swallowing his own oatmeal.

"Why'd you say that? It's our Lena won't give him the time of day."

"If he took his head out his arse he might see harassing her's not the way to get to her to like him."

With her bowl hurriedly emptied, Ylena stood and fixed the scarf around her head.

"Leavin already?" Nory said. "Without even a kiss?"

"I'll have to suffer all day," said Ylena dryly and took her buckets of boiling bathwater from Vera. "Oh, how I ache for want o' you."

"Careful," Masha said. "He might take your word for true."

"Aye, and I'd gut him like a rabbit and string him up just as easy."

"And I'd let you," Nory called after her, laughing, but when the door shut behind her, he quieted. Even Jacks didn't say anything to him, whistling a mournful tune. _I loved you lady mine, under the covers of the long, long night,_ was the only line Gendry could recall.

"Ylena's dry as a bone for you, Nory, but Masha's drippin' for our Southroner." Jacks flashed Masha his crooked teeth, one of which Gendry swore had been soundly knocked out only a week ago by the Maid of Tarth.

Gendry felt his face flush, and refused to look at Masha. How embarrassed she must be, to be accused of wanting a bastard like him. A spoonful of flying oatmeal, flying by his ear to land square in Jacks' eyes, left Gendry's shame all but forgotten.

Jacks cursed and flung his hairy forearms every which way while hard laughter met him on all sides.

"Oi!" shouted Vera, sweating as she kneaded dough with her stout, strong hands. "If ye's acting like children you get out of my kitchen!"

"Sorry!" Masha called, and turned back to Jacks. "You've never been anywhere warm," said Masha. "Now you're jealous on top of cold and miserable."

"I've been a warm place," Jacks retorted. He wiped the last of the oatmeal from his red eyes. "Was I who carried Lord Stark's bones to Winterfell, wench, all the way from King's Landing. M'lord's bones, Masha. I won't be sorry none." He spat on the dirt floor. "The south smells like shit and fish, that's what. And they killed my liege lord. I carried his bones."

"So did poor Quent and Shadd. Talkin' like ye's the only one," she said.

"Don't know why I say anything in front of a southron," Jacks stared, the word cold on his lips. Southron. Of all the crimes he'd been born into and grown to wear, Gendry could not recall being from south of the Neck one of them. Bastard, baseborn, orphan, southron. He could not decide if the new brand was a welcome distraction from the others, or another wound atop the others.

"He en't a spy, Jacks." Masha pushed her empty bowl forward and drew up her shoulders.

"En't he? Prolly for the dragon queen or the nephew she be burning. Why else would our Lord Stark keep a special eye on a southron, and a bastard too?"

"Mayhaps he thinks himself a lord's son, and's been promised a name for the head of a Stark."

"He's no noble —" Masha argued.

"Spy or turncloak, don't matter," Jacks cut her off. "I've seen my fair share of outsiders, and killed my share too." Gendry did not miss the warning, and knotted his hands in his breeches.

"Gendry's no traitor." Masha turned her doe brown eyes on him, expecting an answer Gendry could not give. Guilt's claws gripped him by the innards. _I should have gone with her,_ thought Gendry, remembering a girl with short dirty hair and solemn gray eyes. _And died with her,_ piped the small, dark voice of guilt.

"I best not outstay my usefulness," Gendry stood. The gouge in his chest asserted its presence with itself known again with a dull, stinging throb. the cold stares of Jacks, Nory, and even Masha, whose kind smile dropped away into disappointment, at his back, Gendry swung open the kitchen door and stepped into the blistering cold morning.

Behind the kitchens lay a wall enclosing the Godswood, and the savage wolf within. The highest branches of the ancient weirwood, pale as bone and glowing by the gray light, peeked out from above the battlements. He could almost see the carved face in front of him: cold, hard, implacable. _Old gods indeed,_ he thought, trudging through the snow and under the creaking roof between the great hall and main keep.

Arya's gods had no priests, no rituals, no great gathering halls or hymns or acolytes, no magic he could see. They were trees. _Trees,_ he'd thought with his skeptic's head, but in front of Winterfell's heart tree words left him. As the solemn carved face stared back at him, _through_ him, he was struck by the unshakable feeling the grace of these gods let him live. Gendry had never had need of faith before; the Red God's priests had power to read the future in flames and power to bring the dead back. He had gone down on both knees then. _Bring her home,_ he'd prayed silently to the frightening carved visage, _just this one girl._

In the pattern of granite stone, knots in pine beams and timber walls, footprints in the snow he saw the living shadow of a long and solemn face, as if the walls and trees and snow waited for her, refused to forget her. The sky was gray as a dove's wing past the King's Gate, tendrils of smoke unfurling where Wintertown began to wake.

Inside the smithy, he set back to work on the red blade. He began to hammer the glowing steel in and old and familiar rhythm. But with it, as constant, was the wound of memory. The frozen sweat of his hair thawed and dripped into his face, running down his cheek and into his beard. He shook his head and droplets hissed on the brick hearth. Arya had snuck in to watch him work when they had been captive at Harrenhal. Arya had wanted him to make swords for her family. _You won't ever stop haunting me,_ thought Gendry. He wasn't sure if he wanted her to.

Again and again, he flattened the steel, boiled the dye out of it, heated it, folded the blade upon itself, and set it in the forge once more. By midday the water in his trough had hissed away, and there was no escaping heading out again to fetch water at the well. The walk to the well was cold and the walk to the smithy colder. When he'd first seen snow he thought that was the coldest it could ever get, but every passing day after the Citadel's white raven had come was more bitter than the last. Not even three years into a Riverland winter had prepared Gendry for the cold in the North. He hadn't imagined freezing in a cloak of fur and layers of sheepskin, but here he was, with the buckets in both his arms already forming a film of ice.

"Och! Lad," a voice called. Yanked out of his memories, he found Joseth walking in his direction, bowlegged, a horse blanket draped over his shoulder. "There ye are."

A filly, snorting and shuffling in the mud, was tied to a post beside the door of the forge, just beneath the wooden overhang. Her dappled gray hindquarters caught a dusting of flakes beginning to fall from the sky.

"Set of shoes?" asked Gendry, setting the buckets of ice water by threshold, eager to bring feeling back into his hands. He would soon be needing them.

"Aye, four. She'll be ready for riding after'n. Stubborn girl, like her grandmam. Old Hullen loved that horse silly. Too smart for her own good, and then this one here, well," he chuckled and coming up beside the filly, patted her neck. Gendry listened with half an ear to Joseth's enumeration of the filly's breeding, conformation, and other qualities. Fetlock slopes and pastern lengths and hock angles had absolutely no meaning to him, but he nodded when appropriate. Harwin would have joined in enthusiastically, but all Gendry knew about horses was how to pick up a hoof without being kicked in the head, which end to feed, which end not to walk behind, and where to sit should he want to ride.

Gendry lifted a hoof by running his hand down her knee to her fetlock, pulling up. She jerked her leg and spattered droplets of mud in his face, but he got her hoof solidly on his knee. Good frog, he saw, and healthy horn. He'd need a shoe a hand wide, and hand and a quarter long.

"…'Fraid there's no Lady Lyanna 'round to ride a horse like this, she would make a beautiful mount for a northern lady," finished Joseth, lamenting as he stroked his prized animal's nose.

"Lady Lyanna?" said Gendry, wiping his hands on his woolen trousers.

"Aye. Lord Rickard's only daughter. A real horsewoman, and a brave, beautiful girl. Ah, shan't be sayin' such a sad story."

"She died." Gendry straightened, and glanced at the towering granite mass of the keep, unable to shake the feeling he were being watched somewhere above.

A muscle in Joseth's jaw tightened. Patting the filly again, he said, "All went south, and only their bones returned." Joseth talked little after that, and only to murmur in his filly's ear. Gendry disappeared into the forge, and returned with four sets of shoes looped in the pocket of his leather apron. He hammering each piece of iron to the curve of each hoof on his anvil. One by one he nailed each shoe into the horn, and by the time he was finished, his shoulder smarted hotly once again.

"She have a name?" Gendry asked. Joseth's proud horse snorted and pawed the half-frozen mud with her newly shod feet. She lifted her knees high, testing the unfamiliar weight.

"No' as yet. If she lasts the winter, she might get one."

He untied the horse from her pine post. Before Joseth could thank Gendry, his mouth open to say the words, a shout from the yard interrupted him. The filly shied. Startled by yelling and clanging, she skittered sideways and flung Joseth against the pine side of the armory.

Gendry grabbed only air with his first couple swipes at her tossing head, but on his fourth attempt Gendry caught the leather rope in his hands and dragged her back to the post. Against the wall, Joseth crouched clutching his collarbone and breathing quick, shallow breaths.

"Hurt?" Gendry asked, helping the master of horse from the ground, and onto a bench.

He shook his head. "It's no matter," he gasped, and shakily pointed to the yard. "My boy." In the yard, Joseth's son Robbett, a boy of about sixteen years and decent skill in fighting, crossed wooden practice swords with Rickon Stark. "Stupid boy will get killed."

Robbett was brave, frightful with a sword, and losing. The wildling boy hacked at the boy's arms and legs as if they were little more than still saplings, and spun so quickly the older boy had no chance to land a single hit. Robbett could only block whatever came at him. He dodged clumsily, fright etched on his face beneath the welt on his cheekbone and his split lip. The lordling cracked the boy across ribs with a resounding smack, even through his pads of wools and leather. Gendry could not watch any longer.

"What are ye doing? You'll be tossed out the gates if you lay a hand on Rickon."

"Better me than your boy," said Gendry, and trotted into the yard, weaving past oxcarts and horses, mules laden with logs and turnips, the odd serving boy or girl, leaving Joseth grimacing, pale faced, and alone.

Rickon parried a thrust from the older boy easily, and hit him sharply across the shoulder. Robbett tripped and landed in the mud to land on his knees and elbows. Snarling, Rickon raised his wooden sword to strike. Gendry did not have even a moment to steel himself, nor look around to the scattered servants with buckets of bathwater, crofters with sacks of potatoes, and guards with hands on the pommels of their dirks, half unsheathed and ready. Gendry leapt and wrestled Rickon to the ground.

The boy's sword landed in the mud out of his grasp, and in half a heartbeat all the noise in the yard guttered out. Rickon made no movement beneath Gendry, and Joseth's son too was frozen still.

"Go on," Gendry scolded, voice echoing against granite. "Get your father to the Maester." When Robbett still didn't move, Gendry shouted, "Go! Before you get more than a set of pretty bruises!"

The boy scrambled up, stumbling and favoring one leg, and ran. While he was watching the boy go, a fist came from beneath him and clipped his cheekbone. Gendry reeled from the impact, but held Rickon in the mud.

"You're done scaring stableboys," said Gendry. Rickon snarled and lashed out again. "You can fight me now."

"You're crippled," the boy spat, and reared his head back. His skull thudded against Gendry's cheekbone, rattling his teeth. For a moment the world spotted white.

"Then you won't have much of a fight, will you?" hissed Gendry as he released the boy. His head reeled. Snow melt seeped through his breeches at the knees. his wool tunic and apron wet and black and cold. The left side of his face was splattered with mud. He pressed his fingers to his aching cheek, and found the bone tender but unbroken. He fumbled to his feet with his arm outstretched to Rickon. Before the boy could grab his hand, pain knifed up Gendry's back.

Mud splattered his neck. He fell face first into the slosh. In his teeth he tasted dirt and blood. Two sets of arms wrenched him from the ground, but his salvation was short lived. A fist swung out and Gendry's head. Another, or perhaps a boot, landed a blow in his side. In the center of the stitched up gash in his chest, just beneath the collarbone, a steel plated knee hit home. In less than one strained heartbeat, it stole all the wind from his lungs. The feeling of stitches and raw skin rending was unmistakable.

He registered Nory's sneering face before his knees buckled beneath him and he landed in black mud, gasping. Another man landed a blow to his thigh. _Fierce as a wolverine,_ he heard a whisper, as if in a dream.Gendry grappled for the knife in his boot. His frozen fingers made purchase on the hilt and drove it into the the nearest knot of hard flesh he could reach still pinned to the ground. Next to his ear a man screamed, and the weight pressing him into the mud lifted. "Fuck!" the man shouted, "My leg! Fuck!"

Gendry's eye was too swollen to make out the face of the man yelling, but saw his shape sitting in the ground, grasping his thigh. Gendry's blade stuck out from the meat of it, and all around the dirty snow was red.

"Don't take the blade out, carry him to the maester, and fast. He's screaming worse than it is."

"You'd be fucking screaming too if there was a knife in your leg!"

 _Nory, of course,_ thought Gendry with a flicker of satisfaction before an arm went around his throat, yanking him from the ground.

"I'll gut you myself, southron bastard," growled a voice Gendry didn't recognize in his ear.

"Enough," Gendry heard someone say, someone young. "Put him down."

"Yes, m'lord, of course," rasped the man holding Gendry. The arm around his throat loosened, and Gendry fell back on his knees into the mud.

"You aren't to touch him again," said the boy. He walked to Gendry and looked down at him. "You aren't afraid of me," he said, as if he wasn't quite sure.

Gendry shook his head.

"I ran an inn full of orphans plenty meaner, m'lord. And who else would keep you from killing Robbett, eh? Might as well fight someone your own size."

"You're a foot taller than me," glowered the boy.

"Not like this, m'lord," said Gendry.

Rickon scoffed, shaking his shaggy braid of red hair. "Back to work," he shouted to the yard, and watched the still bodies spring back to life, the quietude breaking into the usual scurrying.

Gendry pulled his aching limbs underneath himself, struggling upright. He inclined his head to Rickon and limped back to the smithy, all the while feeling that the eyes watching him before had magnified, unfolded, and now stared at him with naked mistrust. Inside, he found the buckets of water from his earlier trip to the well waiting for him. He upended them into the trough beside the roaring fire and let them clatter to the wayside. _Boy like you's only as good as his arm,_ Tohbo Mott had told him all those years ago. His stinging shoulder refused to be pushed out of his mind, and within moments of being out of the cold, the pain grew to burning. Gendry pressed a hand to his tunic. His fingers came away Lannister crimson.

"You're bleeding." Rickon stared at Gendry with accusation, hovering in the open door of the armory.

Gendry ripped off the stained linen wrapping his shoulder. "Here to admire the work of your castle guards, m'lord?"

The boy flinched. "They aren't mine," he said. "I didn't order them."

"I suppose you didn't have to, m'lord," said Gendry, vainly trying to reel in the contempt on his tongue. _A sword's a sword, a helm's a helm,_ Gendry reminded himself. Pain seared him from within, and he found he could hardly think of anything else, let alone keep his graces. The skin of his chest was little more than raw red stripes and the deepest cut had torn open. Black threads feathered from the point of his collarbone to the center of his chest, and black blood ran down his arm.

"You aren't from here," said Rickon. "They call you southron."

"Seems a word worse than bastard to your people, m'lord."

"I'm not a lord," he glared. Rickon Stark took after his lordly siblings in look, but there was a glint of wildness in his eyes that neither had. Wolf blood, he'd heard some call it.

"Then what do you say I call you, m'lord?" Gendry frowned, and dunked a rag into the ice water of the trough to wash his wound. Azor Ahai had plunged the Red Sword of Heroes through his wife's living heart; House Stark's ancestral blade would hardly mind being set in a little blood.

"Rickon," he said, shifted his weight from toe to heel and back again, as if he wasn't quite sure. "Southron is from the south. You talk funny and you boss me around and you wear more wools than a swaddling babe."

"Well you talk funnier than anyone, 'cept for them free folk settled around here," griped Gendry _. "_ Mind, close the door. I'm not fond of pneumonia."

The boy complied and inched towards fire roaring in the forge. Gendry coughed, and the pain in his shoulder seized him as he broke more of the scab. Maester Samwell could fix him up again in no time, but Gendry would as soon let a Silent Sister wash him and bury him. The clucking mother hen of a maester would set him down to more bed rest, and Gendry could not waste away in a sickbed for another fortnight. He had work to do.

 _You're a week away from working_ , the fat maester had told him. _I've worked in worse condition_ , was all Gendry said in return. Lord Bran gave him a room of his own in the armory, with a pallet of straw piled with blankets of soft gray wool and even a wolfskin, but Gendry did not doubt that should prove himself useless, the Lord of Winterfell would turn him out as easily as Tobho Mott had. Where would he go if not Winterfell? Would a smithy in the winter's town outside the gates take him? The Wall? He could never return to the crossroads inn, and he felt an ache within him akin to eating acorn paste on a stomach three days empty.

"Where are you from? The Riverlands, like my mother?"

"No," said Gendry, searching his work table for a needle and thread. He was no man of the Crownlands anymore — perhaps he had not been since his mother died — and he could not say the Riverlands could ever shelter him again, though he had found seven years of solace between the terror. He'd seen his orphans become men and women grown. Gendry had given away Tansy to her mousy crofter husband she loved so much only a fortnight before he'd run off in the middle of the night. Run away, chased, the words did not matter. He had gone. Under the cover of darkness, Jeyne had tossed him a bedroll and a week's worth of dried meat, bread, and hard cheese. _Willow will never forgive you_ , she'd said.

"I was born in King's Landing, under the shadow of the Red Keep," said Gendry.

In the flames, molten Valyrian steel simmered lazily, hazy crimson vapors swirling off the top as the red dye Tobho Mott favored boiled away. Undoing his old master's work was almost enough to make up for the piece of steel he'd been promised when he'd been no older than Rickon Stark. Another day of work, and the Starks might get a pink sword instead of a red one. It would take more days of toiling to strip all color from the steel.

"Lord Davos says they killed my father there."

One by one Gendry plucked the frayed thread from his wound. "Lannisters killed him for a traitor, but King Joffrey was the traitor," Gendry said and yanked a stubborn thread out by his teeth. The puncture bled and loosed a trickle of pus — clear, not yellow. He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

"Why'd you leave?"

"Had to."

"Why?"

"That's a long, long story m'lord. And not for telling."

"You should stitch up." Rickon nodded to Gendry's wound, is face impassive to whether the sight of his mangled shoulder bothered him. Gendry supposed little rattled him, after all he'd seen in Skagos. _Cannibals,_ Jacks liked to say, but cannibals or not, the further north a person went, the less mercy he found. Free folk they were. Free to kill and be killed, one man or woman against another; no lords or ladies pointing a finger from a high chair inlaid with gold and sending off armies to murder and die. Free to freeze in a snowdrift, or waste away from hunger, or be killed lawlessly while going about. Free to love whomever they wished.

"I am, and if you're not leaving, best hand me that spool right there," he said, gesturing to the corner of his worktable.

The boy picked it up and glared at it as if it'd done him wrong. "Spool," he said, in accented common tongue and placed it in Gendry's palm.

"S'not a word you'll use often, but it doesn't hurt to know," said Gendry, squinting at the eye of the needle. With his tongue between his teeth, he threaded it. He might have given up and let himself bleed until morning if not for the little lordling's unwavering stare. "Are you going to watch me?"

"I never done it before. Always Osha who done," said Rickon. Inside, Gendry could hear the way the fumbled with the Common Tongue, how he flinched from the walls and beams, flicking his eyes at all the contraptions of the smithy. Gendry could only imagine how strange the boy must feel beside his lady sister, dressed in wools instead of skins and with his nose in front of a book.

"The wildling woman?" Gendry had seen her once or twice in the kitchens, and didn't like the way she leered at him.

"She raise me, like a mother. But my mother is dead."

"So is mine," Gendry admitted. He sucked in a quick breath, and with his teeth clenched so hard they hurt, he stuck the needle into edge of his cut. He spanned the wound, and pierced it through the other side. He tied off the stitch, grimacing through the pain. Gendry let out a rush of air. "She died when I was little," he said.

"Do you remember her?" the boy asked, watching Gendry plunge the needle in again, unblinking.

"She had yellow hair and worked in a tavern," said Gendry. He didn't know if pain had loosened his tongue or the boy's stare, familiar and fierce. "When I was half your age she died. It was a short winter, and not even as cold as your summer snows I suspect, but she died and left me alone."

"All alone? No brothers? No sisters?"

"None that I ever knew," he said. He tied off the last stitch, and hoped his needlework would hold. It looked even enough from where he was.

"My mother had red hair, and a kind voice."

"Is that all you remember of her?"

"She was a fish. The rest I know is only stories from Lord Davos. That she went to fight with brother Robb, who was King in the North. That she and Robb were murdered at a wedding feast, and the Freys are cursed forever for breaking the guest right. Even north of the Wall, we know this true."

"Do you…know of dead men walking?"

"Wights. Monsters."

"Dead men raised by Others," said Gendry, repeating lore he'd heard whispered. "But there's other kinds too. Dead men raised by fire."

"South of the Wall?"

Gendry nodded. "The red priests of the Lord of Light use fire and magic to bring them back, and if you bring back a man close to when they died, it's as if they truly live. Not like the ice corpses." He grimaced, mopping blood from his skin with the tattered remains of his bandage. Jeyne would smack his hand and shout his ear off for putting a dirty cloth to a wound, but all Gendry had untouched by soot were the furs and wools of his cot. Absently he patted the line of stitches, before unclenching his jaw and saying, "Lord Beric Dondarrion and his red priest Thoros brought your lady mother back."

"Back?" the boy breathed.

"She's…not the same, mind," said Gendry, swallowing the uneasy lump in his throat. "She was dead for three days before Lord Beric's men found her. Lady Catelyn died at the red wedding, and her soul went down the river. All that was left was hate."

"I knew she would never come back." Rickon looked old the moment he said it, far older than four and ten. "But I still hoped. A childish wish, and stupid."

"You _are_ a child," said Gendry.

"What do you hope for?" Rickon asked him, for once looking the boy he was.

"That…" he began, and stopped. He swallowed hard, and swore every single inch of him ached: from his likely fractured cheekbone, to his newly stitched gash, to the sinews in the center of his heart. Within him, he imagined a sound like a curtain rending, screaming as its fibers tore in half. "I hope…," he said, "your sister…will come home"

"But my —" he started, and then frowned with resolution. "Arya," he said.

 _Arya._ Seven years ago he'd run through mud deep as his ankles after the Hound's retreating horse, screaming her name through sheets of rain until Lem and Anguy and Harwin galloped past, until he was hoarse, until his clothes stuck to his skin and he was shaking from the cold, unable to run any farther along the pockmarked road. _Arya._ He could not recall when he had stopped screaming, and watched the rain wash her trail away, paralyzed.

Lem had barreled in and found Gendry shivering and blue lipped by the hearth of the crossroads inn. _You bloody stupid bastard boy!_ _You've got manure for brains, and the rest of you's as worthless,_ Lem had shouted, far off and ringing dimly somewhere outside _Arya, Arya, Arya_ , roaring in Gendry's head. _Should've stayed in Flea Bottom to rot,_ he'd yelled. The dull shout fractured into splitting pain as Lem shoved his gloved fist into Gendry's side. Beric's men, who'd picked Gendry up by the side of the road and joined the chase, didn't stir a finger.

He'd found his face hitting cold dirt. _Should've let King Robert's cuckolding queen murder you, then at least we could have had some of the coin you lost us!_ A foot swung out and found his ribs. _Why didn't you stop her? Why didn't you?_ He'd woken the next morning, numb, in a daze of medicine and pungent herbs with a nasty pneumonia, three broken ribs, and a gaping hole where his heart was once.

"Arya," said Gendry, the old knife inside him twisting. He had not said her name aloud in seven years.

**Author's Note:**

> To Be Continued...
> 
> A/N: Please be kind and review.
> 
> Are the characters making sense? Or are they too OOC?
> 
> Is the setting and plot elements as they are presented in the story clear enough?
> 
> What doesn't seem to make sense when you read it?
> 
> Is the pace of the story too fast or too slow?
> 
> If anyone wants to keep up with the story, I usually answer [questions](http://macneiceisms.tumblr.com/ask) and post [progress](http://macneiceisms.tumblr.com/tagged/rita-writes-nk) of the upcoming chapters on my [tumblr](http://macneiceisms.tumblr.com/)


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